Google Fonts.

Google Fonts comprises more than a thousand font families under open licences that may also be used commercially free of charge. Well-known examples are Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Montserrat and Playfair Display. For many websites they are the obvious choice: good quality, broad language support, no licence fees.

The classic embed loads the fonts from Google's servers on every page view. In the process, the visitor's IP address is transmitted to Google. In Germany, the Regional Court of Munich ruled in 2022 that this was a breach of data protection, because the transfer took place without consent and without necessity; a wave of warning letters followed. No comparable ruling is known in Switzerland, but the DSG also requires transparency about disclosures to third parties. The simplest solution is to self-host the fonts — then no data flows to Google.

Self-hosting is technically better too. The font files come from your own server or CDN, there is no additional connection to a third-party server, and you control caching and preloading. Frameworks such as Next.js download Google Fonts automatically at build time and serve them locally. For WordPress and other systems there are plugins or theme settings that take care of this.

For loading speed, what counts is how many styles are loaded. Every combination of weight and style is a separate file. Variable fonts combine many weights in one file; subsetting removes characters that are not needed. With font-display: swap and suitable fallback fonts, text appears immediately without the page jumping when the font loads — good for Cumulative Layout Shift.