Alright, sorry to make it sound like that. Either way, it adds overhead (local or Google) but CDN-loaded ones cause more issues. Google Fonts is the web's standard for non-system fonts and indeed it adds CSS, JS, additional requests, and the font itself, including wait times due to download and load. SEO is a competitive environment, even a single request, and ms counts. Small blogs might not care but if your website gets traffic, those little millisecond differences rank your posts differently.
Our pages are around 80kb in total (yes you are reading correctly, not 800kb but 80kb including images of the blog posts, including the WebP images, javascript, CSS, and the HTML file itself. Imagine doubling or quadrupling it just for a font. That would be insanity. 100kb font size is absurd if you want your mobile speed (#1 SEO factor today) to be better.
Core Web Vitals scores us 100% for everything. This drops to 80%~ when we use external fonts. We tried 100s of different metrics. The font is a major factor (again, doesn't matter local or Google). Added overhead is going to sink your ranks like a rock.
For anyone reading this, do not use Google fonts if you want your SEO to be better.
Our pages are around 80kb in total (yes you are reading correctly, not 800kb but 80kb including images of the blog posts, including the WebP images, javascript, CSS, and the HTML file itself. Imagine doubling or quadrupling it just for a font. That would be insanity. 100kb font size is absurd if you want your mobile speed (#1 SEO factor today) to be better.
Core Web Vitals scores us 100% for everything. This drops to 80%~ when we use external fonts. We tried 100s of different metrics. The font is a major factor (again, doesn't matter local or Google). Added overhead is going to sink your ranks like a rock.
For anyone reading this, do not use Google fonts if you want your SEO to be better.