OMGF wasn’t able to Process all Google Fonts on my site

It’s possible that after activating OMGF not all Google Fonts are served from your server, i.e. hosted locally. As of v6, OMGF will notify you if it finds a Google Fonts request in the frontend it can’t process.

There are several reasons why OMGF couldn’t fix it automatically. In this article I’ve attempted to list all possible reasons, including suggestions on how to fix it.

After applying the fix, simply click the link of the page in the red box and you should see the stop light turn green in OMGF’s admin bar menu.

If you’re not tech savvy enough, an upgrade to OMGF Pro will take care of all of it automatically.

Check for Known Issues with Themes/Plugins

First thing you’ll want to do is check the list of known issues with 3rd party plugins. This list provides simple fixes to issues with the most popular WordPress plugins. You will be notified in OMGF’s dashboard for most of the cases listed there, but still it doesn’t hurt to check it out.

If your used plugins aren’t listed there, check the list of tested themes and page builders. If your theme needs additional configuration to work with OMGF (Pro), you’ll find it there.

Conflict with Optimization Plugin

OMGF and OMGF Pro are tested with most popular optimization plugins. But since OMGF is in itself an optimization plugin, there’s a chance its cache can collide with the cache of the optimization plugin you’re already using.

All optimization plugins use cached static files to quickly serve their optimized files, e.g. CSS or Page Cache. However, there are some situations where this cache can collide with OMGF (Pro)’s cache:

• If you’re using multiple optimization plugins, e.g. WP Fastest Cache and Autoptimize, make sure they’re not both doing the same thing. There’s no added value in minifying/combining CSS twice, so disable that feature in one of the plugins and allow just one of them to work its magic.
• Sometimes cache can be stubborn in its removal. You can click “Clear Cache” a 100 times, but it’s still there. Remove it manually to make sure you’re serving a fresh, optimized copy to your visitors.

To rule out that your optimization plugin is causing issues, a good place to start is to temporarily disable it. Some plugins provide URL parameters to temporarily disable it from the frontend:

• Autoptimize can be disabled by appending ?ao_noptimize=1 to the URL,
• WP Rocket disables when any GET-parameter is added to the URL, e.g. ?no_wprocket=1 .

You need to upgrade to OMGF Pro

If you only have OMGF installed, and it’s still detecting externally hosted Google Fonts, chances are these requests are buried too deep for OMGF to detect them. If this is the case, you need OMGF Pro.

There’s an important difference between OMGF and OMGF Pro:

Usually, Google Fonts are inserted into your pages by loading a stylesheet (
<link rel="stylesheet" etc. /> ) referencing the Google Fonts API (https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=etc.) onto the page. This is the most common method, and is supported by the free version of OMGF.

OMGF Pro extends this with several advanced methods, and is able to:

• Parse inline stylesheets (<style> ) for @import statements referring to fonts.googleapis.com/css (and /icon) and @font-face statements referring to fonts.gstatic.com/s/.
• Parse local stylesheets (.css files) for @import statement referring to fonts.googleapis.com/css (and /icon) and @font-face statements referring to fonts.gstatic.com/s/.
• Parse external stylesheets (.css files) for @import statements referring to fonts.googleapis.com/css (and /icon) and @font-face statements referring to fonts.gstatic.com/s/.
• Parse inline WebFont Loader (<script>)

After installing OMGF Pro, you’ll notice that the previously red box, changed into yellow:

Clicking on each of the links will run OMGF Pro’s auto-configuration sequence, which auto-detects which method it should use to replace all Google Fonts on that page with local copies.

Long story short, OMGF Pro detects all Google Fonts technically possible to download and replace with local copies. This covers ~98% of all implementations. The remaining 2% are either very exotic implementations (contact me if you found one), or embedded in iframes. Which I’ll explain in the next chapter.

Google Fonts are loaded by an embedded document, i.e. <iframe>

Some applications allow for easy insertion into your webpage through the use of iframes. Some popular examples of this are:

• Embedded Youtube videos
• Google Maps widgets
• Google Recaptcha
• Most support chat widgets, e.g. Tidio, tawk.to, etc.

These applications run on an external server, but are embedded into your page through an
<iframe> element. Since OMGF (Pro) runs on your server, and not the 3rd party’s server, for obvious reasons, these Google Fonts can’t be detected and/or modified to be loaded locally. You can read more here.

In most cases, OMGF (Pro) will notify you if it recognizes an iframe known to load Google Fonts. If it doesn’t, please contact me so I can help you find a solution and add it to the list of known iframes.

Google Fonts are loaded asynchronously

A somewhat exotic method to load Google Fonts is loading them asynchronously using JavaScript, themes like Enfold and plugins like Forminator are known to use this method.

When using Developer Tools to search for references to fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, you might stumble upon a regular stylesheet element, looking like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=A+Font+Family+Name:100,200,300" />

If this stylesheet wasn’t added asynchronously, the free version of OMGF would’ve captured it. If this isn’t the case, it’s safe to assume that it’s added asynchronously. To verify this, you can: 

• Right-click anywhere on your page, 
• Click View page source, this’ll display the page source of your page. 
• Press CTRL (Windows/Linux) / CMD (MacOS) + F to search the page for “fonts.g” and keep pressing Enter/Return to browse through the results.

If the stylesheet you found in your Developer Tools is present in the page source, then the stylesheet
isn’t loaded asynchronously. If it’s not present in the page source, then this means the stylesheet is added at a later point and therefore loaded asynchronously. Upgrade to OMGF Pro to make sure these Google Fonts are loaded locally.

A theme/plugin uses an(other) exotic implementation

As I stated earlier, OMGF covers the most common implementation method of implementing Google Fonts: loading a stylesheet into the HTML. OMGF Pro extends this with several less common methods.

If OMGF Pro isn’t capable of detecting all Google Fonts on your page, and they aren’t loaded by an embedded document, then this might mean your theme or plugin is using another exotic implementation to load Google Fonts.

I made it my mission to support any and all implementation methods, so please
contact me, and include the URL of your site in the message, so I can figure out why there are still external requests on your site. If I can do something about it, you can count on it that I will. 🙂