You get only 2 seconds to convince your visitors about your relevance. If you fail, the visitor clicks the back button and leave your site for good. Here’s how you can stop it.
Regardless of which CMS (Content Management System) you use to build your website, the choice of fonts is critical to creating an impressive user experience, especially when your potential audiences are spending huge amount of time accessing online content from their hand-held devices. According to the latest report by the Pew Internet, nearly two-thirds (63%) of cellphone users now use their phone to go online and browse the internet.
Choosing wrong fonts can lead to legibility issues, making it hard for your audiences to read your content properly. This can seriously hamper the user experience on your site.
So, What are My Options?
Choosing fonts for your website is an important decision. Technically, fonts depend on both Operating System and Web Browsers in order to appear correctly on the screen your audience is using to view your website.
In other words, your website may look different to different viewers depending on their Operating System and Web Browsers. So, if you have chosen a font family that is not supported by their OS or Web Browser, the content will not appear how you have intended for your audiences.
Therefore, the web development best practices recommend using alternative or fall-back fonts along with your choice of font.
More often than not, the alternative fonts should be the standard fonts that nearly all Operating Systems and Browsers support.
So, if the first choice of font didn’t appear on their browser because of the aforementioned technical discrepancies, their browsers will fall back on the alternative standards fonts to serve the content on their screen.
This is exactly why web developers test compatibility of their websites against multiple devices running on different Operating Systems, using all popular web browsers.
When it comes to web fonts, you have many options to choose from. The choices for web fonts range from paid to free although free web fonts are quite popular among web developers.
Adobe Typekit is one of the popular shops to buy premium fonts. Similarly, FontDeck is another popular shop that allows you to buy web fonts.
As for the free web fonts, Google Fonts is very popular among web developers. The fact that Chrome browser is the most popular web browser among the Internet users today, also makes using Google Fonts a strong case.
Why Google Fonts are Popular
Introduced in 2010, the popularity of Google Fonts can be attributed to the fact that they are extremely cool and yet available for free use to the web developers. Google keeps on adding more fonts to the repository with the passage of time.
There are an extensive range of Google fonts to choose from and they can be combined creatively to achieve a highly professional look for your text.
How to Use Google Fonts on Your Website
You can use Google Fonts on your website in two ways:
If your website is running on WordPress, you can install this plugin, activate it and then choose any from the given font options as per your requirements.
If you can’t use the plugin option, then you could add a piece of code in your CSS file. To get the code, you need to choose your desired font on Google Fonts and then choose the code generated in the next step.
Chrome Extension for Fonts
Oftentimes, we all come across websites that have great fonts but there’s no way to identify the fonts. Luckily, there’s a Chrome Extension to help you. Named as WhatFont, the extension, once installed, will help you identify the fonts so you can get to do further research about their availability.
Click Here to Install WhatFont on Your Chrome Browser.
If you’re particularly interested in Google Fonts, you need to know if a certain font is available in Google Fonts. However, it’s often a tedious process.
To help you out, here’s a list of all Google Fonts. So when you find a certain font and want to check if it’s available with Google Fonts, just go to this list and search for it and you can find your answer within a matter of seconds.
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Coming Soon: How to Optimize Your Fonts for Mobile-First Approach
