Font loading for small teams

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Most advice about font loading assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to keep

Custom fonts commonly block the first paint. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

How we handle it

A sensible fallback prevents invisible text. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

In practice

Speed is a feature people notice only in its absence, and then they leave rather than complain. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.