Preload fonts

Hello @vladroman

Thank you for your inquiry and I am happy to assist you with this.
Unfortunately, W3 Total Cache does not have the ability to preload fonts at the moment. We are working on this and this will be implemented in future releases.
You can do it manually and directly edit the header.php of your child theme.
So in your header, you should add, and this is just an example as I do not know the exact path:
<link rel="preload" href="simple-line-icons/Simple-Line-Icons.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin="anonymous">
Please note that this is just an example and you need to edit the code accordingly with the path to the font and the font type. So make sure that if you are preloading href="simple-line-icons/Simple-Line-Icons.woff2" the type=needs to match the font in this case woff2.

I hope this helps!
Thanks!

Thank you for quick answer.

Yes, I’ve resolved this issue myself. I’m a bit lazy. ?? So I used plugin Insert Headers and Footers for including

<link rel="preload" href="/wp-content/themes/oceanwp/assets/fonts/simple-line-icons/Simple-Line-Icons.woff2?v=2.4.0" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin="anonymous">
<link rel="preload" href="/wp-content/themes/oceanwp/assets/fonts/fontawesome/webfonts/fa-solid-900.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin="anonymous">

As alternative it is possible to do with function.php in child theme, of course.

But this is not a good solution.
1. Inserting fonts is duplicated.
2. Everytime when I update theme I have to check that nothing changed in it with this fonts.
3. Everytime when I change theme options I have to check that it still uses this fonts (cause with some options it doesn’t use).

So we need automatization. And this is job of perfomance plugin.

I’ve found several topics here with same problem. In everyone you promise to implement preload for fonts. And some of this topics are old. ??

But I hope, W3TC developers will find time for this. In the near future. ?? Preloading fonts is very usefull feature.

Hello @vladroman

Thank youj for the information.
I have not promised anything I’ve just stated that we are working on this for future releases. It may be included in W3 Total Cache or may not. So the team is considering this for sure.
Since you’ve found those topics, I guess you’ve seen that W3TC does not have that feature.
I understand that the provided solution may not work as expected, however as I mentioned before, W3 Total Cache does not have the font preload feature.
Thanks!

I’ve seen that W3TC doesn’t have this feature at topics started time, but not now, so I asked again. ??

Any reason DO NOT include preload fonts feature to W3TC? Maybe I don’t understand something and using rel=”preload” for fonts is bad for page optimization?

I just don’t understand why developers didn’t work on it. And even doesn’t garantee, that will be. It is very easy in implementation. You have options much more complicated. So I now worried that my knowledge not enough to understand that preloading fonts is bad for site. ??

Hello @vladroman

rel=”preload” for fonts is not bad for optimization.
As you can see there a lot of options in W3 Total Cache and since most of the Theme options have the option to preload fonts the feature is on stand by when it comes to W3 Total Cache.
Preloading the fonts is not bad for your website, it’s just that W3TC does not have that option.
Thanks!