Users Already Have Fonts on Their Computers, So Use Them

Yes, your corporate brand font is lovely. It’s so playful and charming but it delays the web page display by 4 seconds as the font needs to be downloaded from the server and rendered—and nothing appears until it loads—driving your users crazy.

Including custom display fonts for headings and titles is fine; it helps to brand the product and adds some visual interest. However, using custom fonts for body copy is generally a bad idea.

First of all, these fonts have to be loaded from somewhere, whether it’s Google Fonts, Typekit, or your own content delivery network (CDN). This means that there is an overhead in getting the font files down to the user’s machine. Content-heavy pages will often break while the correct fonts are downloaded and rendered—the dreaded Flash of unstyled content or Flash of unstyled text.

Secondly, if, by specifying wild and wonderful body copy...