Web fonts & SEO

[Maxxum]

Hi everyone !

My question is regarding web fonts. We are currently working on a new design for our website and we're thinking about using web fonts instead of images containing the fonts we'd like to have.

I'd like to know if web fonts can affect SEO as they need to be downloaded on the visitor's computers and consequently can slow down the load time of our web pages.

If anyone has used web fonts in the past, do you have some specific tips to share ?

Thank you in advance for your answers!

Jeremie

[DougRoberts]

It's probably a bit of a balancing act. The advantage of using web fonts is that it makes the text that you would have "hidden" in images accessible - goof thing for SEO if the text includes keywords and/or describes the content.

As you say, the downside is the additional load time. This depends on the particular font and of course where it's hosted. I've used the google hosted fonts on a project and not had any significant problems with speed.

Speed can be a red herring though as you would have had to download the images before. If you're replacing lots of images with web fonts then you may actually be delivering fewer bytes.

Perception can be different though as the browser has to download the font before it can render the text.