Five mistakes teams make with font loading

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit font loading.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Common failure modes

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Custom fonts commonly block the first paint
• Self-hosting removes a third-party round trip
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

A sensible fallback prevents invisible text. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Turning this into a decision

In practice

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Three things worth confirming about font loading before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Custom fonts commonly block the first paint — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.