Self-hosting fonts: a Core Web Vitals and GDPR win
Loading fonts from Google's CDN costs you speed and, in Germany, legal peace of mind. Here's why this site self-hosts every typeface.
Most sites still load fonts from fonts.googleapis.com. It’s one line, it works, and it quietly costs you two things.
The performance cost
An external font request means an extra DNS lookup, connection and round-trip before text can render in the intended typeface — a classic contributor to layout shift and a slower Largest Contentful Paint. Self-hosting the font files puts them on the same origin as everything else, so they arrive with the page.
This site ships its typefaces as self-hosted variable fonts. No third-party request sits between the visitor and the words.
The GDPR cost (this one is specific to the EU)
In Germany, a court found that embedding Google Fonts via Google’s CDN — which transmits the visitor’s IP address to a third party without consent — can violate the GDPR. Whatever you think of the ruling, it created real risk for site owners.
Self-hosting removes the question entirely: no visitor data leaves for a font.
The takeaway
Self-hosting fonts is a small change that improves Core Web Vitals and sidesteps a privacy problem at the same time. For a site aimed at a German audience, it’s not a nice-to-have.