The State of Web Vitals

Preloaded fonts

How many fonts the page preloads.

Field data PhoneDesktopAll Scope All sites Q1 2026 edition · Desktop 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
desktop field data

The typical site preloads 0 fonts.

The State of Web Vitals · Q1 2026 · 94,910 sites · desktop 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 · desktop 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 78% 0.03
1 3,509 79% 0.03
2 3,846 84% 0.02
3 1,590 79% 0.03
4 1,480 79% 0.03
5–6 1,295 78% 0.04
7 264 86% 0.03
8–9 300 71% 0.05
10–12 224 80% 0.04
>p98 240 73% 0.04
Good Needs Improvement Poor Faded rows: under 100 sites

Preloaded fonts 0. p75 0. p99 7. At the low end (0): CLS 0.03. At the high end (>p98): CLS 0.04. computed

The State of Web Vitals · Q1 2026 · 94,910 sites · desktop 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?

Passing LCP barely moves across the range: 86% at one end, 82% at the other. This signal does not separate passing sites from failing ones.

The effect is bigger on CLS. With few preloaded fonts, 78% of sites pass it. With many, 71% do.

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