Almost every business has a website. It may seem very simple, but choosing the right font can be quite tricky. In this blog, we explain how to choose the best font for your website.

Suitable fonts for company websites
Every business needs a website that is easy to read. Not only does the font you choose have to fit the page, the chosen typography also has to be able to be displayed on as many devices and in as many browsers as possible. The best font for your website is readable by as many internet users as possible and loads as quickly as possible.

Why is font loading speed important?
You may have found a very pretty and unique font, but if no one can read your website, it’s obviously of no use to you. Moreover, you also don’t want the text to take a long time to load or the layout to get jumbled up, because then the customer will become impatient and leave your site.

This is the case, for example, with Google Fonts, a font service with lots of choices that was still being used on 42 million websites in 2020, but is performing significantly worse. Alternatively, you can download the fonts and host them yourself to improve performance.

WOFF and WOFF2: best performance
Today, the best font formats (types of fonts) are WOFF and WOFF2. This stands for ‘Web Open Font Format’ and was developed in collaboration between some of the largest browser providers (Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft) to support text on all browsers and thus display it properly. WOFF fonts were launched in 2009 and were readable on 98.6% of all browsers by 2021. WOFF is only 30 kb in size and therefore loads relatively quickly.

But the improved version released in 2017, WOFF2, is only 23 kb in size and therefore has a big advantage for performance. The faster your site loads, the more people will use it, even if the difference is very small (if only a hundredth of a millisecond). The downside is that WOFF2 is readable on 96.8% of all browsers and therefore has a slightly smaller range, but in that unlikely case you can always use WOFF to fall back on if a browser cannot read a WOFF2 font. If your target audience is mostly people with modern browsers, you don’t need anything else.

Older browsers and devices
Only if you want to reach people who use older devices or browsers, for example computers or browsers more than 10 years old, it might be smart to also use fonts like EOT or TTF. But that chance is pretty slim: most versions of Internet Explorer, for example, are not supported these days, and modern browsers like Chrome do not support SVG.

Want to know more? Need advice on how best to present your business digitally? Then get in touch with us! Our web design team is always happy to assist you.