Last week WP 6.5 was released, introducing the Font Manager among other things. Helping an old lady cross the street, that’s what it felt like to add Font Manager support to OMGF Pro v3.12. The Font Manager’s performance was severely lacking, so I decided that OMGF Pro should be the hero to save the day.
Curious to find out what else the new release of OMGF Pro has to offer? Keep reading!
Other notable Changes in OMGF Pro v3.12
First off, I’m very excited to tell you about the way OMGF Pro is able to boost your Font Manager’s performance. But, I think it’s only fair to shed some light on other notable changes in this release:
Continuous Integration
Although it’s not a direct feature you can use, I’m very excited about it. And you should be, too!
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time recently to add integration/unit tests and continuous integration to all my WordPress plugins.
OMGF Pro is currently on a 92% code coverage. Something I’m very proud of, as it should reduce the chance of bugs in future release significantly.
I’m currently figuring out what’s the best way to test OMGF (Pro)’s compatibility fixes with the latest versions of 3rd party plugins and themes, so I can stay on top of breaking updates of these products and release patches ASAP. But, more on this later!
Early Access support removed
The Process Early Access setting has been removed from the Detection Settings tab, because it’s considered obsolete and unsupported by Google’s developers. Therefore it offers no added value alongside the other advanced detection schemes OMGF Pro has to offer.
All of the fonts that were previously considered Early Access are now available through the regular Google Fonts API. At the moment they are still available, but they might be removed in the future. In other words, notify the plugin’s or theme’s developer if a product is still referring to the unsupported Early Access API.
Added Kirki Framework support
A small, yet useful tweak is the added support for theme’s built on top of the Kirki framework.
The Kirki framework already offers the ability to self-host the selected Google Fonts to comply with privacy regulations, but it lacks the ability to filter subsets and unused fonts.
As of v3.12, fonts added by the Kirki framework will show up in OMGF Pro’s Optimize Local Fonts table and allows you to unload/preload/replace each font!
Font Manager Support
Now, on to the topic at hand.
Last week, we discovered that the Font Manager tops the charts when it comes to UX, but severely lacks in terms of performance. Fortunately, OMGF Pro v3.12 is here to lend a hand.
The Testing Example
As an example, I’ve configured the default TwentyTwentyFour theme to only use fonts added by WP 6.5’s Font Manager. Now, it looks like this:
To mimic a real world example, I only changed the default fonts in this example. The configured font-weights remain the same: 300 and 900 for Poppins and 400, 700 and 400 italic for Aleo.
WP Font Manager Test Results
Now, let’s see how WordPress’ latest default theme performs without OMGF Pro:
Due to the lack of variable fonts support and the default inclusion of multiple subsets, 5 separate requests are made ranging from ~30KB to ~50KB each. The total transfer size is ~180KB.
Let’s see if OMGF Pro can help this slow, old lady cross the street a bit faster.
OMGF Pro Test Results
Because OMGF Pro allows subsetting your Google Fonts, and I’ve configured it to only use the Latin subset in this example, the size of each file has shrunk significantly.
Comparison: Font Manager VS OMGF Pro v3.12
Aleo italic went from ~28KB to just ~15KB!
It’s worth noting that this file is a Variable Font file. So, contrary to the file loaded by the Font Manager, it actually includes all font weights. Still it’s almost 50% smaller, because we stripped all unused subsets!
Aleo normal is a variable font file, too. This effectively reduces 2 requests to just 1 and it’s reduced in size! Just ~37KB instead of ~53KB.
The power of subsetting your Google Fonts is best shown in this example by the use of Poppins.
The combined size of the 2 font files added by Font Manager is a whopping ~100KB! It might not sound like much, but it’s huge (!) in terms of font files.
After stripping all unused subsets, each requested font file for Poppins only takes up under 8KB of space. That’s a 84% decrease!
Overall, OMGF Pro is able to reduce the total transfer size from ~180KB by roughly 40% to just ~106KB.
Saving 80KB might not seem like much. But shaving 80KB off a 500KB webpage (like our example) means a 16% reduction in pagesize. In our testing environment it meant a ~50ms faster pageload on a speedy WiFi connection!
In competitive markets, 50ms could mean the difference between being in- or outside the top 3 search results on Google.
Summary
OMGF Pro’s code quality will now be guaranteed by continuous integration and automated compatibility checks are underway. Other notable changes are the removal of Early Access support and the addition of support for the Kirki Framework.
While technically it’s only a minor release, OMGF Pro v3.12’s added Font Manager support offers significant performance optimization to users of Google Fonts in Gutenberg. In this post we mimic a real world example using the TwentyTwentyFour theme and we were able to reduce the transfer size for Google Fonts by a whopping 40%!
