Web Font

Definition

Web Fonts are a set of TrueType Fonts, OpenType Fonts, and WOFF formats that are used on the web for styling and designing the textual content of a website. These fonts can be used as hosted services or can be self-hosted. They enable you to incorporate unique, attractive, and compatible typography into your website’s design, which is not covered by the traditionally limited set of ‘web-safe fonts’.

Web Font Relevance For SEO

Web Fonts might impact SEO largely due to their influence on website performance and user experience. Google and other search engines rank websites largely based on user experience. This means that the speed of your website and how its content is displayed can impact your SEO. A fast-loading and well-designed site is more likely to retain visitors and lead to lower bounce rates, which is a positive indicator to search engines. If the web fonts are not optimized properly, the website’s load time can increase which often results in a lower ranking in search results.

Web Font Best Practices for SEO

1. Choose Your Fonts Wisely: Select a font that not only looks good but is also easy to read. Your choice of font can either improve or harm your website’s readability.
2. Use Font Hosting Services: Reliable hosting services like Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts can serve fonts much faster, improving your website’s load time.
3. Minimize the Number of Font Variants: Using too many font variants can slow down your site, so it’s best to keep them to a minimum.
4. Optimize Your Font Delivery: Implement technologies like WOFF2 for compression, CSS3’s ‘font display’ property to control visible text during loading, and leverage browser’s async loading for fonts.
5. Use Modern Formats: Modern formats like WOFF2 offer superior compression and thus load more quickly, which can improve your site’s speed and SEO performance.