2020-03-05
2684
#css
Anna Monus
15206
Mar 5, 2020 â‹… 9 min read

Variable fonts: Is the performance trade-off worth it?

Anna Monus Anna is a technical writer who covers frontend frameworks, web standards, accessibility, WordPress development, UX design, and more. Head to her personal blog Annalytic for more content.

Recent posts:

react view transitions and activity api tutorial

React View Transitions and Activity API tutorial: Animate an AirBnB clone

Explore the new React ViewTransition, addTransitionType, and Activity APIs by building an AirBnB clone project.

Emmanuel John
May 9, 2025 â‹… 8 min read

gRPC vs REST: Choosing the best API design approach

Compare gRPC vs REST to understand differences in performance, efficiency, and architecture for building modern APIs.

Alexander Godwin
May 9, 2025 â‹… 6 min read
Why Go wasn’t the right choice for the TypeScript compiler

Why Go wasn’t the right choice for the TypeScript compiler

The switch to Go may be a pragmatic move in the short term, but it risks alienating the very developers who built the tools that made TypeScript indispensable in the first place.

Muhammed Ali
May 8, 2025 â‹… 4 min read
how and when to use type casting in TypeScript

How and when to use type casting in TypeScript

Discover the basics and advanced use cases of type casting, how and why to use it to fix type mismatches, and gain some clarity on casting vs. assertion.

Paul Akinyemi
May 8, 2025 â‹… 14 min read
View all posts

3 Replies to "Variable fonts: Is the performance trade-off worth it?"

  1. I’m surprised that you were only able to find one font family with both static and variable versions, when there are quite a few out there, including, but not limited to Gimlet by David Jonathan Ross, Oswald hosted by Google fonts, and Zeitung by Underware.

    Not all variable fonts are created equally. Some are created with a much better emphasis on file size. I was shocked when you mentioned the huge size for Roboto variable, since this is not the normal for variable fonts. I have seen many under 100kb. Here’s an article here that shows how the Gimlet variable font is smaller in size than the static alternative (http://stuff.djr.com/gimlet-vf-size-test/).

    So by using only a single example of a font family that is out of the norm for file size, it can give a very misleading impression on the performance of variable fonts.

  2. > The first contentful paint took just 1.2s, down from 1.6s, a 25 percent improvement. Consequently, Lighthouse’s performance score is also a bit higher: 100 instead of 99. This is most likely because Google Fonts runs a few checks to decide which font format/file to load, while our self-hosted CSS contains static file paths.

    There is definitely a performance hit to using Google Fonts. See here: https://www.tunetheweb.com/blog/should-you-self-host-google-fonts/

    Good post though. Seems to me variable font makers need to be careful how many axis’s they add. If Roboto used italic (one variant which is on or off) rather than slant (12 variants with full range) would it be smaller? Also dropping wdth would also presumably make it up to a third smaller?

  3. I presume the Lighthouse First Contentful Paint (FCP) is larger than the GTMetrix Fully Loaded Time (FLT) because Lighthouse was set to simulate a slow mobile connection. But, why does the “Bonus Test Case” do so badly on the Lighthouse FCP (relative to Test cases 2 and 3) but not on the GTMetrix FLT?

Leave a Reply