Blog Fonts/Typography Plugin Editor

Hi Char, Fonts can be one of the most challenging ingredients when building your website. You can't simply use the fonts that are installed on your own computer, for a number of reasons. First of all, fonts are protected by copyright, just like any other software. Your desktop computer uses fonts that are licensed to you and/or your operating system (Mac OS, Windows, etc.). This license permits the use of those fonts on your computer, but not necessarily on the Internet. Second, just because you have a font installed on your computer doesn't mean that visitors to your website will also have the same fonts installed. If you've ever created a document in Microsoft Word using particular fonts, then sent that file to another person using a different coputer or operating system, you may have encountered this situation. When that person opens your file, their computer automatically replaces missing fonts that are installed on their computer. This results in changes to the the layout and typography, which means the recipient is not necessarily seeing your document as you intended. Web fonts, on the other hand, are different. They are small, downloadable files that render fonts in real-time directly within the viewer's web browser. Google Fonts is by far the most popular web font library, and there are several WordPress plugins that enable you to specify any of those fonts for use in your WordPress-powered website. You mentioned the Google Typography plugin, but there nearly a thousand other plugins that enable you to use Google Web Fonts in your WordPress site. Another popular solution, particularly among web designers, is Typekit: https://typekit.com Typekit is a subscription font service that brings thousands of fonts from foundry partners into one library for quick browsing, easy use on the web or in print. But there is one important caveat to consider when choosing whether or not to use web fonts in your website. Every font face — and every variant: e.g. bold, italic, etc. — is contained in a file that must be downloaded to each and every visitor of your website in real-time, to be rendered by their web browser. This can dramatically affect load times, and Google has begun factoring page load times into their ranking algorithm. What does this mean? If you choose to use web fonts in your WordPress site, do so sparingly. If you use every variant of even just 2-3 fonts, your pages will load more slowly, and this could negatively impact where your site shows up in Google's search engine rankings. For this reason, some web designers are choosing to use the default system fonts instead. Doing so means that your website will look slightly different on each and every device, depending on the subtle differences between the system fonts. But for many, that's an acceptable compromise to ensure the fastest-loading web pages — and therefore better search engine rankings. Hope this helps as you consider whether to use web fonts in your WordPress site!