
No matter how beautiful web fonts are, they are of no use to you if they slow down the loading time of your website. Therefore, the search engines did not know what the website was about and could not rank the website well accordingly.īut beware! Web fonts can also negatively influence loading times if too many of them are included.Īlthough fonts are very important for websites and can have a positive impact on bounce rates, recognition and the length of time your visitors spend on your site, there are unfortunately – as with all too many things – disadvantages to using online fonts.

In addition, some search engines (and screen readers of visually impaired people) could not read the text contained in the graphic. The problem here was that large graphics slowed down the page loading time. Before the introduction of web fonts, the integration of special fonts had to be done via a graphic. Web fonts are not only a blessing for web designers, but can also have less of a negative impact on search engine optimization. ✅ Little interference with search engine optimization Likewise, there are licence agreements for fonts that state that you can use the font free of charge on your desktop, but not as a web font. As a rule, you can use these for your website free of charge.īut always read the licence conditions of the respective font to be on the safe side! There are fonts that you may only use free of charge for non-commercial purposes. Many font providers such as 1001fonts, Google Fonts, Font Squirrel and dafont provide licence-free fonts. In contrast to system fonts, thanks to the introduction of fonts on the Internet, web designers can make use of eye-catching fonts and thus support their corporate design. Such fonts are already pre-installed on common operating systems so that they can be displayed on a MacBook or Windows laptop without any problems.Įxamples of web safe fonts are Arial, Times New Roman and Verdana – so only the crème de la crème of fonts 😉 If no web fonts could be loaded or cannot be loaded today, web safe fonts are displayed instead. Thus, the same fonts are displayed for each visitor without having to be installed on the visitor’s computer.īefore the age of web fonts, only pre-installed system fonts could be used. Provided the visitor’s browser supports the font format – which is usually the case with standard browsers – the corresponding font is temporarily downloaded and displayed to your visitor when the website is called up.


Web fonts are extremely practical because the fonts are directly integrated into the CSS of the website. Online fonts are the counterpart to desktop fonts in that they are not installed locally on an end device but are loaded from an external web server.

What is a web font? In short: fonts for websites.
