You probably have realized that serving your fonts through Google’s Font CDN is faster than serving your fonts locally, but if you’re like me you may be wondering if Google’s CDN is the fastest CDN available. So I decided to test the Google Fonts CDN versus the Cloudflare CDN.
TL:DR
My personal experience is that after using seven different series of fonts, the Cloudflare CDN is consistently faster on a 4G mobile network by about a second, but the difference on laptops or desktops with a good connection is less noticeable.
Assumptions of Knowledge
You will need to understand how a content delivery network and caching works if you want to understand this post.
The Kinds Of Pages That I Tested
I used both Bootstrap based and WordPress based pages. And each page had different kinds of content.
Update (7/31/24)
I have written a new article about Cloudflare Fonts that expands on this blog post’s discussion.
The Local Server I Tested On
I used a HostGator shared server to run every font series that I tested. This is hardly the world’s greatest server, but it isn’t terrible either. So it is a good local server to test on if you’re trying to determine average results.
The Tools I Tested With
I primarily relied on Google Page Speed Insights to test the performance of my different pages.
The Work Necessary to Perform the Updates
I wouldn’t say that performing the updates was complicated, but it was tedious and time consuming. It required a lot of attention to detail. Ordinarily, this is part of the fun of coding, but when you’re doing something as monotonous and repetitive as this, your mind might fight to wander off into more entertaining territory.
My method was to hard code the results when I used Bootstrap pages. And for my WordPress pages, I used a simple plugin that served primarily as a code template that resulted in mostly hard coding.
There are other WordPress plugins that don’t require you to write code, but they have inefficient coding, so I would be concerned that they would not be ideal for improving page speed. The plugins are only designed to host your fonts locally. So if they don’t process the results fast, then they will contradict the speed enhancement of being served through Cloudflare. The plugin that I used was designed so that each time you must rewrite it to host exact fonts for an exact page, so there is no processing waste needed to be performed for generalization.
The Results of the Google Fonts CDN Versus the Cloudflare CDN
I don’t want to be too presumptuous as to why the performance was faster; I only want to note that the performance was consistent. I don’t remember how many tests I performed, but after considering standard deviation, it was safe to say that the tests resulted in about a second faster in page speed on a 4G mobile network. However, desktops that already loaded fast didn’t load much faster.
Is It Worth the Time and Effort?
I don’t have a great answer to that question. Taking the time to do this isn’t something that I would encourage every website owner to perform. But if you get a lot of mobile traffic, and your visitors don’t have a lot of patience, then I would certainly consider it.
If you’re not a developer or you are not unusually tech savvy, then you may find this operation to be pretty difficult. There are a lot of different ways to make mistakes, so almost anybody that tries this is likely to make one. And if you don’t know how to troubleshoot, then you’ll probably get stuck. So if this is important to you, and you don’t have the means to do it yourself, then you should probably hire a pro.