Perplexing and Bursty: Say Goodbye to Google Fonts on Your WordPress Site

If you’re looking for a way to jazz up the design of your WordPress site, you may have turned to Google Fonts. These beauties are free, easy to use, and offer a never-ending selection of typography options – heaven for design lovers, right? However, there are situations where it makes sense to remove them from your site.

Why Would You Want to Remove Google Fonts?

While Google Fonts are beneficial, there is a catch-22 situation. Having too many HTTP requests on your site can increase page load times; slowing down your site can dramatically reduce the user experience. Removing Google Fonts is a quick and easy way to lessen the number of external requests your site sends out, rendering your page lightning fast. So, let’s get to it.

What Are the Steps to Taking Google Fonts Off Your Site?

1. Identify Where Google Fonts Exist on Your WordPress Site

To locate Google Fonts on your site, you first need to understand where they are coming from.

• In your WordPress theme’s style.css file
• Via third-party plugins
• Within your website’s HTML

You can use Google Chrome developer tools to identify which Google Fonts your site is calling. Identify the Google Font URLs by right-clicking anywhere on your WordPress site, selecting “Inspect,” and clicking the “Network” tab.

Next, refresh the page, go to the “Filter” option, and select ‘Fonts” from the drop-down menu. If any fonts are loaded from fonts.googleapis.com, that means Google Fonts are being used on your WordPress site.

2. Remove Google Fonts Loaded From Stylesheet or Plugin

To remove Google Fonts from your WordPress site, you must edit your website’s style.css file. You can gain access to this by using an FTP client like Cyberduck or FileZilla or through the cPanel file manager.

If you’re using a WordPress plugin that calls Google Fonts, open the plugin’s stylesheet and use the same method as style.css.

Once you are in your WordPress site’s directory, click on the “wp-content” folder then select the “themes” folder. Now, select the theme that you’re using or that you want to remove the Google Fonts from. Then, open its stylesheet, usually named style.css, and search for the following code:

@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans');

Replace the code above with:

/* Google Fonts Removed */
@import url('');

3. Use Custom Code to Remove Google Fonts Loaded Within HTML

If none of the above actions helped you remove the Google Fonts from your WordPress site, you can use custom code in your website’s HTML.

To do this, access the Appearance > Theme Editor > header.php and add the following code at the top:

Benefits of Removing Google Fonts from WordPress Site

1. Improves website performance, which can be a significant factor in improving your website’s overall performance score.
2. Reduces the number of external requests made by your site.
3. Gives site visitors faster load sites, leading to a much better experience when navigating your site.

In Conclusion

We love Google Fonts for their ability to change our site’s look and feel, but they can slow us down. Removing them from WordPress sites can help make your website load in the blink of an eye, speeding up your website’s performance and giving your visitors a better user experience. The above steps will enable you to remove Google Fonts from your WordPress site with ease.