The State of Web Vitals

Preloaded fonts

How many fonts the page preloads.

Field data PhoneDesktopAll Scope All sites Q1 2026 edition · Phone field outcomes
Metric LCP INP CLS
1

At a glance the headline numbers for Preloaded fonts

How many fonts the page preloads.

0
on the typical site
half of sites sit at or below
0
1 in 4 sites exceed this
the top quarter
7
the heaviest 1%
the long tail
94,748
sites measured
phone field data

The typical site preloads 0 fonts.

The State of Web Vitals · Q1 2026 · 94,910 sites · phone field datacorewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
2

Distribution & median CLS site count and median CLS at each level of preloaded fonts

0.00 0.04 0.08 0.11 0.15
0.1
0 41000 82000
0 1 2 3 4 5–6 7 8–9 10–12 >p98
Good (≤0.1) Needs improvement Poor (>0.25) Site count
The State of Web Vitals · Q1 2026 · 94,910 sites · phone field datacorewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
3

Passing CLS by preloaded fonts which level passes the CLS most often

Preloaded fontsSitesPassing CLSCLS
0 82,000 89% 0.00
1 3,509 88% 0.00
2 3,846 93% 0.00
3 1,590 84% 0.00
4 1,480 89% 0.00
5–6 1,295 88% 0.00
7 264 92% 0.00
8–9 300 86% 0.00
10–12 224 90% 0.00
>p98 240 87% 0.00
Good Needs Improvement Poor Faded rows: under 100 sites

Preloaded fonts 0. p75 0. p99 7. Spearman with CLS r = +0.48. At the low end (0): CLS 0.00. At the high end (>p98): CLS 0.00. computed

The State of Web Vitals · Q1 2026 · 94,910 sites · phone field datacorewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
4

Why this matters for the Core Web Vitals, and where to start fixing it

Fonts are discovered late by design. The browser must download the CSS, parse it, and find rendered text that actually uses an @font-face before it requests the font file. A preload skips that whole chain and starts the download with the HTML.

Preload the one or two fonts that render above-the-fold text, and stop there. Every preloaded font competes with the LCP image for early bandwidth. A preloaded font that is not used above the fold made the page slower for nothing.

How does this affect the Core Web Vitals?

Preloaded fonts correlate with the LCP. With few preloaded fonts, 82% of sites pass the LCP. With many, 76% do. The decline is gradual. There is no point where sites suddenly start failing.

Go fix it Responsive font loading strategy → Self-host Google Fonts → Guide to resource prioritization →
Related signals Page weight & requests → Responsive image markup → Image loading attribute → Media source → Chrome field data from 94,910 sites, representing millions of real page loads · How we measured