Font

A font does more than make text readable. It largely sets the tone and feel of a brand. A sans serif often reads as businesslike and modern, a serif as more classic and trustworthy, a display or handwritten font as louder and more personal. Visitors register that within a second, before reading a single word — which is why type belongs to your brand identity, alongside colour and imagery.

There are paid fonts, licensed per site, app or number of visitors. There are also plenty of very good free ones. Google Fonts is the best-known source: hundreds of families you may use freely, including commercially. Other free sources include Fontshare and open-source releases from type foundries. Free does not mean lesser: many well-known sites run on families like Inter, Manrope or Source Serif.

Speed is a technical matter. Every font you load is an extra file, and each style (regular, bold, italic) can be its own file. A variable font packs all weights into one file and is often lighter than three separate ones. Modern formats such as WOFF2 are smaller than older ones. Self-hosting fonts on your own domain is usually faster than an external source, and loading only the characters you need (subsetting, e.g. Latin only) saves more.

Also mind what happens while loading. If text only appears once the font arrives, visitors briefly see nothing; if it then jumps from fallback to the real font, your layout shifts. That affects Core Web Vitals. Picking a fallback with similar metrics keeps the jump small.

Practically: stick to two families (one for headings, one for body) and no more than three or four weights. Test on mobile, check numerals and special characters, and verify the licence before using a font in a logo or app.