GoogleNobody publishes a recommended number. The measured web loads 4 font files on the median page and ships 122 KB of fonts on the median mobile home page, which is the third-heaviest resource type and a long way behind images and JavaScript (Web Almanac, 2025).
How many fonts should your website load?
There is no official number. The median page loads 4 font files, the bottom tenth of pages load none, and the top tenth load 9 or 10.
Each weight and each style is a separate file, so two typefaces are almost never two requests.
HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025 · desktop pages, July 2025 crawl. On mobile the 75th is 6 and the 90th is 9, and a second figure in the same chapter puts the mobile median at 3 rather than 4.
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 10th | 0files |
| 25th | 2files |
| 50th | 4files |
| 75th | 7files |
| 90th | 10files |
Is that what makes your site slow?
Almost never. On the median mobile home page fonts are 122 KB, against 911 KB of images and 632 KB of JavaScript.
The rest of the page is where the seconds are, and we put those numbers side by side in how fast a service business website needs to load.
Almost no difference between desktop and mobile, and the chapter puts three quarters of all font files under 80 KB (Web Almanac, 2025).
Bold, light and italic are their own files, so a single family can add several hundred kilobytes (Web Almanac, 2025).
Font files at the 90th percentile run 115 to 116 KB, usually complex scripts or files nobody subset (Web Almanac, 2025).
They still use the fonts already installed on the device, which cost zero bytes (Web Almanac, 2025).
Why does your text flash, or show up late?
One line of CSS decides it. The font-display value is set to swap on about half of the pages that use web fonts, and to block on about a quarter.
HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025 · mobile, July 2025 crawl. The chapter’s prose describes these as pages using web fonts and its figure labels them sites; the values do not sum to 100 because one page can declare several.
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| swap | 50.1% |
| block | 24.9% |
| auto | 8.5% |
| fallback | 5.1% |
| optional | 0.5% |
Fallback text appears at once and is replaced when the font arrives. The visible shift is the price you pay (Web Almanac, 2025).
The glyphs stay hidden for a moment. About 70% of real-world block usage is icon fonts, where a short blank beats a broken icon (Web Almanac, 2025).
auto leaves the choice to the browser. fallback allows a very brief blank and then always swaps (Web Almanac, 2025).
Font Awesome’s CSS defaults to block and was observed on about 17% of pages (Web Almanac, 2025).
Where do your fonts come from, and does it matter?
Less than it used to. About 72% of sites serve at least one font from their own domain, and Google Fonts is on 47% of mobile sites.
HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025 · mobile sites, July 2025 crawl. Combinations that add Font Awesome or Adobe make up the remainder.
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Self-hosted only | 36.4% |
| Self-hosted + Google | 31.7% |
| Google only | 11.9% |
A hosted font is also one more third party your page calls, which is the subject of who else is collecting data on your website.
The same share on desktop and mobile, and about 4 to 5 points higher than in 2022 (Web Almanac, 2025).
And 54% of desktop sites, down from 57% in 2024 (Web Almanac, 2025).
The chapter notes that browser changes like cache partitioning removed some of the old performance advantage of Google’s CDN.
A local copy of Font Awesome alone is about 8.5% of desktop and 9.3% of mobile font requests (Web Almanac, 2025).
What is actually worth fixing?
Three things, in this order: serve WOFF2, cut the file count per family, and stop loading an icon set for six icons.
- 01Count the filesOpen the network panel and filter by font. Four is the median page; nine or ten puts you in the top tenth of the web (Web Almanac, 2025).
- 02Serve WOFF2It is about 65% of all font requests, and the two WOFF formats together are about 81%. A site still shipping TTF is paying for compression it never got (Web Almanac, 2025).
- 03One file per familyEach weight and style is its own download. A variable font collapses them into one, and 41.3% of mobile sites already use at least one (Web Almanac, 2025).
- 04Drop the icon fontIf six icons pull in a whole icon set, inline the SVG files instead. Those sets are where most self-hosted font traffic comes from (Web Almanac, 2025).
HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025 · share of font requests on mobile pages, by service, July 2025 crawl
View data
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Google woff2 | 77% |
| Self-hosted woff2 | 74% |
| Self-hosted woff | 18% |
| Google ttf | 13% |
| Google woff | 10% |
| Self-hosted ttf | 8% |
Start by counting. Four files is ordinary, nine is a decision someone made for you, and it is usually sitting in a theme nobody opened.
- 01Count the files
- 02Serve WOFF2
- 03One file per family
- 04Keep text visible
Questions owners ask
How many fonts should a website load?
There is no published recommendation. The median page loads 4 font files, the bottom 10% load none, and the top 10% load 9 or 10 (Web Almanac, 2025). Each weight and style is a separate file, so one family is rarely one request.
Do web fonts slow a website down?
Rarely as the main cause. The median mobile home page ships 122 KB of fonts against 911 KB of images and 632 KB of JavaScript, and a typical font file weighs 35 to 36 KB (Web Almanac, 2025).
Why does the text on my site flash or appear late?
That is the font-display setting. swap shows fallback text immediately and swaps when the font arrives, on about 50% of mobile pages using web fonts. block hides the glyphs briefly, on about 25%, and roughly 70% of that is icon fonts (Web Almanac, 2025).
Is Google Fonts or self-hosting better?
Both are normal. About 72% of sites serve at least one font from their own domain, Google Fonts reaches 47% of mobile sites, and 11.9% use Google only (Web Almanac, 2025). The chapter notes that cache partitioning removed some of the old CDN advantage.
Sources
- HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025, Fonts chapter (16,213,084 sites, of which 15,426,398 mobile; July 2025 crawl; read from the chapter source in the Web Almanac repository at commit 302168d, November 3, 2026) (2025)
- HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025, Page Weight chapter (same crawl and sample; font request counts and median home page bytes by resource type) (2025)
- HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025 Methodology (sample sizes and crawl date: 16,213,084 sites total, 15,426,398 mobile, 12,155,374 desktop) (2025)
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