Google Font makes page load very slow in China

Question

I am using Google Fonts on my site. Some clients in China said that the site loads very slow. I checked it, it is caused by the Google Fonts. I looked at the Google Fonts FAQ, they said it will download the font file to the customer's computer before loading the site. Are there any ways to fix this slow loading issue?

Rogelioroger

Can you edit your question to provide the specific code for how you are including the font? Did you use the "quick use" option? Can you post a network timeline that shows the specific order and delay in which resources are fetched for your page? – Hemp

Answer 1

This was a known issue... Google Fonts were slow loading in China. Previously you could serve mirrors of the fonts through Qihoo 360 CDN servers in China. However, as of August 2016 the problem has been fixed. At the same time Qihoo 360 has stopped fonts.useso.com and all mirrored fonts hosted under fonts.useso.com stop working now. Details are described here.

Google has fixed Google Fonts, which now directly serves the css and font files from Google’s servers in Beijing, which means Google Fonts are much more stable and faster to users in China now.

I recommend all webmasters who have been using fonts.useso.com switch back to the original Google Fonts as soon as possible.

Trawl

As of August 2018, the fonts.googleapis.com domain seems very unreliable in China. I am getting constant timeouts using this, so an alternative such as local hosting is still required – Sweetandsour

Answer 2

I figured a way to fixed it. Instead of loading it with link tag, I changed to load the font with javascript and load it async, it is fine now. much faster

Rogelioroger

Can you post how you did it ? – Vivle