
Images do not block the loading of the page (provided the width and height are specified) but loading too many small files will cause performance issues. When using icons that are immediatley visible in the viewport it might be a good idea to avoid layout shifts completely by using images instead of a WebFpnt. Use separate images in SVG or WebP format instead of a font It just decreases the impact.Īdvantage : Significantly reduce the size of both the CSS and the FontSet.ĭisadvantage : Does not solve layout shift and only reduces render blocking. Unfortunately this method does not solve anything. These tools not decrease the WebFont size, but also drecrease the CSS file size. There are various tools such as icon, fontello and glypher that will help your built your custom icon font. That is why you should create your own font subset. You probably will never use 4950 of them. Some icon fonts contain more the 5000 icons. HTTP/2 allows multiple files to be fetched simultaneously through 1 connection. HTTP/2 is the improved, much faster version of the HTTP/1 protocol.

Note that it is important to implement HTTP / 2 for this method. Now downloading the font file comes with less overhead. The browser has allready connected to your server and does not need to create a new connection. That is why it is faster to self-host your WebFont on your own domain. In the meantime, the screen just stays black (remember, CSS is render blocking). That will cost you 1 to 2 seconds on a mobile internet connection. If this stylesheet is not already cached by your browser then a browser must first connect to that CDN. For example gives instant access to 5000 icons. It's easy and it takes just one line of code.
#Webfont icon free#
Many web fonts can be loaded directly from a free CDN. Always load the font or icons from your own domain. In some cases it may be useful to implement a combination techniques at the same time! 1. The techniques are not mutually exclusive. There are 5 ways to make icon fonts load faster, reduce blocking and avoid layout shifts. How can we speed up icon fonts and fix these issues? This layout shift causes a negative User expereince and is an important factor in the Google Core Web Vitals. When the fonts is loaded and rendered the page style needs to be recalculated causing the lay-out to shift. Icon fonts will always cause a layout shift.That CSS file blocks loading and causes a delay in the LCP and FCP. A large, render blocking CSS file is needed for an Icon Font because all letters have to be 'mapped' to an icon in yiour stylesheet.Usually we would like to avoid this flash of invisible text but that is not possible with web fonts. After the font has been loaded the icons appears on the page.
#Webfont icon how to#
A browser will not know how to deal with this because it has no system icons fonts available.īecause there is no substitute font available, the space for the icon remains empty during page load. There is no point in substituting an icon font.

The default behavior of the CSS file is to block loading of the page. To add to that, webfonts also use a CSS file to 'map' the fonts. This creates a small (or large) layout shift on your page. That is why the browser continues building the page and as soon as the font has been downloaded, the icons are painted on the screen. WebFonts are loaded anly when a font glyph is visible on the page (to be specific, the glyph must be used in a visible TextNode). WebFonts can get in the way of loading a page.
#Webfont icon download#
įor now it is important to remember that, in order for WebFonts to work, you need to download not only a CSS file but also a WebFont file. In font awesome you can, for example, use to display a gear icon. The fonts are accessed through CSS classes. Instead of using separate images, all icons are combined in one single WebFont file. What they all have in common is that a trick is applied. Some are gigantic like font-awesome and offer webmasters access to over 5000 icons while others are a bit smaller like Weather Icons. There are many different of Icon Fonts in circulation. Font awesome loaded from CDN without modification Font awesome lazy loaded What are font icon sets?
