As you may have understood, Google fonts are a series of characters contained in a real topographic library, specifically it is a set of application programming interfaces or better known as APIs. In particular, it allows all users to use web fonts in their own application or website. In particular, they can be used freely since they are equipped with a free license, in detail it is a library that makes a real interactive web directory available to everyone, which is essential to make the selection and management of fonts easier through Android. and CSS.
Google makes this service available and all the characters present and bandwidth are definitely free.
For this reason, it is necessary to carefully choose the most appropriate fonts for your case, in order to optimize technical performance and make the website pleasing to the user's eye.
What is Google Fonts?
Google Fonts is a free license to simplify fonts through CSS and Android. Google Fonts was created to simplify finding fonts and is available for free with open source licenses. They can be used for both commercial and non-commercial projects.
Within the site, through the appropriate search command, we can choose the most aesthetically appropriate font for our case and retrieve it within our site, to ensure that the text on a particular page is formatted according to these dictates.
With the definition of the first CSS specifications, in fact, the need arose for web resources to easily retrieve fonts not from local terminals but from servers, to ensure correct display for everyone.
Google Web Fonts, today Google Fonts, has replaced the previous TypeKit in providing fonts to embed on websites: in fact, it is enough to integrate the appropriate code into the HTML or CSS of the site to guarantee the same display for all devices.
The fonts that we can choose are divided into:
- Serif (serif font), small extensions at the ends of letters that appear to bring them closer together, like Droid Serif;
- Sans Serif (sans serif font), such as Roboto and Open Sans;
- Writing Instruments by hand (fonts that resemble handwriting), such as Shadows Into Light;
- Monospace (font whose characters have the same width and which have a style that resembles that of typewriters) such as Inconsolata
- Screens (fonts with very close lettering) such as Lobster and Poiret One, generally suitable for large projects
Fonts should be chosen in an agreement, without exaggerating so as not to overload the site too much; opting for more than two or three fonts per page would make reading difficult.
Advantages of using Google Fonts
Google Fonts, as mentioned, are website aesthetic assets that can boost dwell time and CTA conversions. In fact, they offer several advantages:
- Free and secure font library (provided by Google)
- Free-to-use fonts for commercial and non-commercial projects (no license restrictions apply)
- improve page readability
- very light (they make the loading of the web page that hosts them faster)
- very versatile - available in numerous versions to meet everyone's visual and formatting needs
- make sure fonts are compatible with all sites and apps
- aesthetically attractive
All Google Fonts meet precise Google community standards and prove to be highly compatible with most sites.
Why use them?
As we know, the fonts used can also have a significant impact on the loading times of web pages and the readability of content. They translate, therefore, into important elements for the user experience of the page, which in turn can affect positioning through the satisfaction signals produced by user use.
Google Fonts are designed by Google to send the file in the lightest way possible in relation to the technologies used for its use.
Thanks to a shorter loading time we can achieve a lower bounce rate on our website, increasing the chances of conversion. In fact, a difficult-to-read font discourages reaching the bottom of the page and prompts the user to exit before responding to the call to action.
What Google Fonts to choose for our site?
Typography can be very valuable to your site. An appropriate font for your project reflects the aesthetic style of the website, is very readable and conveys a certain personality.
In the store there are more than 1040 fonts among which we will surely find the right one for us. Furthermore, as we have mentioned, the fonts are available for free, so we can experiment with one or another until we find the one that best suits our site. So let's take some time to choose the right font for our site design, which will encourage more reading.
To choose the most suitable Google Fonts for our site we must pay attention to several aspects such as:
- readability
- professionalism in line with the style of the site
- web project size to fit
- site theme
Among the most popular fonts in circulation we have:
- Roboto (system font for Android)
- Kinsta (used by Google for some websites)
- Source Sans Pro (Adobe's first open source font)
- Raleway (special large format font)
- cheerful and
- nunito sans
- Work Sans (suitable for screen use)
Google fonts are free
The license, as mentioned above, is free and, being open source, there are no costs. However, it's good to know that certain characters are distributed through the Apache license. However, in both situations there is an opportunity to use them for commercial use as well. Additionally, this collection is also served by Monotype's SkyFonts and Adobe's Edge Web web services and also by Monotype's Typekit.
Recently, more precisely from 2021, this project has also been extended to icons, since through a first set of symbols composed of general communication needs and material icons that offer the possibility of downloading the elements directly to the desktop for use in digital format valid for both iOS, Web and Android.
How to install Google Fonts on the site
Google Fonts can be embedded from the site on which they are placed or downloaded and embedded via FTP, as well as used for printing projects.
Before downloading one or more fonts from Google Fonts, it is important to choose them. The online catalog definitely includes countless characters. This service, in addition to satisfying all the needs of users from this point of view, offers the opportunity to quickly search for the ones you like the most and that you intend to use on your platform. In particular, the official Google Fonts page allows you to decide different filters to quickly and easily carry out a precise search, in detail, there is the opportunity to intervene in the following sectors:
- Search - This field allows you to type the exact name of a font that you already know;
- Text preview - allows you to see a real preview of the optical effect of the font you want to use, this happens in particular when choosing a basic text or adding a sentence according to your preferences;
- Font size - Fine-tune the pixel measurements of the text presented during the preview phase ;
- Categories - Select the font type based on the 5 sections in which all Google fonts are found;
- Language - Limits the search by the alphabet of a specific language;
- Properties Font – Choose certain font properties, such as the number of styles, slant, weight, and width.
How to install Google Fonts
- visit the google fonts site
- select the font in question
- Click Download to download it in zip format
- unzip the folder, right click on the ttf file and select install:
In this way we can use the same fonts as the blog or site to create ebooks or graphics according to the web style.
First of all, you should check if our website theme already integrates Google Fonts, as the latest premium themes are already configured to host them. Otherwise, we can install a plugin like Easy Google Fonts or Google Fonts Typography to introduce them.
If we do not want to install another plugin, we can resort to the call through the Google Fonts API . In this case, you need to add a link between the HTML sheet and the style sheet.
The platform provides us with the appropriate code to embed in the of the HTML page to simplify retrieval of selected fonts on our site.
How to Add Google Fonts to WordPress
It is good to know that there are two main methods to include Google Fonts directly in your projects, specifically for a WordPress style, you need to install a certain plugin where there is an opportunity to delegate the work or the other option to add a font involves the manual procedure .
First of all, if the work is done using the WP environment, it must be analyzed that the theme does not include Google Fonts at the same time by default. To check this aspect, just check the performance in the corresponding configuration panel. If this form is not present, there is another option which is to download the plugin such as Google Font Typography or Easy Google Fonts, installing it directly in the panel, at this point you can continue with choosing the font that most attracts your attention.
Also, if you want to use the Google Fonts API to include fonts directly on websites using the manual procedure, you do not need to do any programming as all you have to do is simply integrate a specific link to the style sheet in the HTML document. Therefore, it is necessary to mention the source in a CSS style. Simply to carry out this step quickly and calmly, simply copy and paste the code indicated in the link label that is specifically located in the folder called header of the site. Finally, it is essential to use the resulting CSS to push the rule to the HTML components.
Conclusions
By now you will surely understand what Google Fonts are and how you need to install them on your website, page or blog to be able to use them.
Fonts represent an important part in the world of graphics and websites where they make the style of the platform unique and special. Choosing Google Fonts is definitely an important step as they will visually define the style. Based on the studies carried out by web design, it emerged that in this sector it is necessary to follow certain rules to have a perfect result according to your preferences and needs, in particular, the latter specifically refer to colors, shapes and fonts.
As for the fonts, the latter must be: easy to read and understand, if the chosen font is not easy to read, it is recommended to use it graphically in some images through graphic elements, perform one of the cross-browser compatibility checks, use From one to a maximum of three different style fonts, use classic type fonts using a serif font for titles and headings and sans-serif instead for texts.
