Until today, loading fonts from Google Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) was advocated, mainly for performance reasons. This practice must now change, as the RGPD has come and gone!
In fact, a German company has been fined by its country’s courts for using fonts hosted by Google. This practice now violates the privacy rules of the European Data Protection Charter
Default themes updated
From Twenty Twelve to Twenty Seventeen, all WordPressdefault themes have been updated by community contributors. From now on, fonts will be grouped directly into theme folders. No need to upload them from Google’s servers.
The new process began nine months ago, but it took some time to refine the results. Indeed, native themes are usually updated in conjunction with WordPress version upgrades.
“The reason the updates are coordinated is that themes are usually updated to be compatible with new WordPress versions, so releasing them at the same time makes a lot of sense,” said Jonathan Desrosiers lead contributor.
What changes for the user?
WordPress.org has published a developer note to accompany this wave of updates to legacy default themes. It includes sample code for :
- use a new stylesheet from the themes directory ;
- set the editor style in a custom theme configuration function;
- remove the font stylesheet and include a custom set of fonts in a child theme.
This change particularly impacts sites where the font stylesheet has been modified or removed in a child theme of one of these default themes or in a plugin.
WordPress should officially ban remotely-hosted fonts as soon as the update of legacy default themes is complete. The WP themes team therefore strongly encourages theme authors to switch to locally hosted web fonts.
Some themes, such as Kadence or Astra, already offer you the option of loading your fonts locally. You’ll find these settings in the theme’s customizer or dashboard, and as they’re sometimes a little hidden, we’ll show you where they are:
- For the Kadence theme In the customizer, open the “General” tab, then in the “Performance” submenu activate the “Preload Local Fonts” button.
- For the Astra theme In your WordPress dashboard, go to the Astra menu, then on the Astra dashboard you’ll find the “Settings” tab in the menu bar. In the settings panel, open the “performance” tab and activate the “Load Google Fonts locally” button.
For themes that don’t yet offer this, and if you want a simple solution, plugins like Local Google Fonts or OMGF (Optimize My Google Fonts) will be your best friends.
