System Fonts on a Website

Something small with a big impact. Something that’s often already determined for you by a WordPress theme: the fonts you use on your website. There are plenty of options available, but what exactly are system or local fonts? We’ll cover that in this blog post!

There are several major advantages to using system fonts or local fonts. Not only do they help your website load faster, but they also ensure your website immediately complies with strict privacy laws.

Many themes and other plugins use a font by default that needs to be loaded externally. In other words, they rely on third parties to make the fonts available on your website. While this looks nice, there are some significant drawbacks.

The Drawbacks of External Fonts

When your WordPress website uses an external font (such as a standard Google Font link), your visitor’s browser must first connect to an external server to download the font. This comes with three major drawbacks:

• Slower load time (Web Core Vitals): Every external request takes time. The browser must wait for the font to load before the text can be displayed correctly. This can cause a Flash of Unstyled Text (FOT), where the visitor first sees the text flash in an unattractive default font. This negatively impacts your Google scores.

• Privacy and GDPR risks: As soon as a visitor loads your website and a font is fetched from an external server (such as Google), the visitor’s IP address is shared with that third party. According to European privacy legislation (GDPR), this is not permitted without explicit prior consent. In the past, this has already led to substantial fines for website owners in the worst-case scenarios.

• Dependence on third parties: If the font provider’s external server experiences an outage or is slow, your website will be directly affected.

What are system fonts, and which ones are available by default?

System fonts are fonts that are already installed by default on your visitor’s device (such as a Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, or Android device). Since the font is already stored locally on the computer or phone, your website doesn’t need to download any font files. This results in a website that loads instantly, smoothly, and at lightning speed.

These days, standard system fonts are high-quality and have a very modern look. Here are the most well-known system fonts that are readily available almost everywhere:

1. The Modern 'Sans-Serif'

These are the minimalist, super-bold fonts that are perfect for modern websites, tech blogs, and online stores. They’re designed for maximum readability on screens.

• San Francisco (-apple-system): This is the ultra-modern font that Apple uses on all iPhones, iPads, and Macs. It has an exclusive and clean look.
• Segoe UI: Microsoft’s default font (known from Windows 10 and 11). It’s sleek, professional, and extremely reliable.
• Roboto: The familiar face of Android (Google). A very open and friendly font that scales perfectly on mobile screens.

2. The Classic “Serif” Font

Do you want to give your website a formal, reliable, or editorial look? As if you were reading a luxury newspaper or a physical book? Then there are the classic system fonts:

• Georgia: This is the king of serif screen fonts. Georgia was developed by Microsoft back in the ’90s with one specific goal: to be extremely readable on digital screens. It’s warm, elegant, and ideal for long blog posts.
• Times New Roman / Palatino: The well-known classics that have been found on virtually every device for decades.

For example, open them all side by side in your browser. You can easily do this by Googling them, and try to imagine which one best suits your website. Another option available in most WordPress themes is to test this out live on your website right away. This gives you a complete picture of how it might look. For example, as we tested in our Monday blog post using a custom theme created with Claude.

Does that really make such a difference in speed? (Spoiler: Yes, a huge one!)

“Does that one millisecond really matter?” The short answer is: yes, absolutely. External fonts are the digital speed bumps of the internet.

When you use an external font (such as a standard Google Font), your visitor’s browser has to take a sort of mini-road trip. First, the browser travels to an external server to request permission; then, the large font files (Regular, Italic, Bold) have to be downloaded via 4G or 5G on your phone; and only then can the text appear on the screen.

If you use a local or system font like Georgia, you save your website this entire journey. The result?

0 bytes downloaded: The font literally weighs nothing. And it doesn’t have to make the trip from third-party sources.

No jittery text (CLS): You’ve seen it before: you open a website, start reading, and suddenly the entire text jumps around because the font takes a second to load. It’s annoying for the reader, and Google penalizes you for it. With system fonts, everything stays rock-solid right away.

Green scores in Google: Google loves fast websites. By removing external fonts, your Core Web Vitals (Google’s speed metrics) will immediately turn green.

In a world where every millisecond counts for your search visibility—and where visitors click away within 3 seconds if a page is slow to load—system fonts are the ultimate free turbo boost for your website!

Switching to system fonts (or hosting your favorite Google Font locally on your own hosting package at MijnHostingPartner.nl) is one of the easiest ways to speed up your website and make it GDPR-compliant. You’ll save precious milliseconds on load times, which is great for your visitors and for your ranking in Google’s search results!

Tip from MijnHostingPartner.nl: Check your WordPress theme settings in your hosting control panel ( under “Typography”) to see if you can select “System Fonts” or “Inherit.” Many modern themes now support this with just one click!