In GPP 1.4, it’s now possible to choose the font variants you need for your chosen Google Fonts.
This is important, as each variant that has to load is an extra file your website has to load. Reduces the number of variants that load will speed your website up – sometimes considerably.
Let’s take Open Sans for example:
By default, we have all of those variants:
- 300 – super light
- 300italic – super light, italic
- regular
- italic
- 600 – semi-bold
- 600italic
- 700 – bold
- 700italic
- 800 – super bold
- 800italic
Now if we know in our content we’re only going to need a few of these, we can remove the ones we don’t need and our site will load faster. So, my site only needs:
- 300 – some light headlines
- regular – all of my content
- 700 – bold is definitely needed from time to time
Now, if I’m loading a different font just for my site title, I know that my site title is only going to be one style – light, bold, italic etc.. This means we can specify the one and only one variant that we need for this area.