Leverage the `font-display` CSS feature to ensure text is user-visible while webfonts are loading

Leveraging the font-display CSS feature is an essential technique to optimize the way web fonts load on a web page. This can help ensure that text is user-visible even when web fonts are still loading, providing a better user experience and potentially improving the performance of your site.

Why Leverage the font-display Feature?

1. Improve User Experience: By controlling how web fonts load, you can ensure that users can read the text content immediately, even if the custom font hasn't loaded yet.

2. Enhance Loading Performance: Utilizing font-display allows you to reduce the perceived load time of your site. Users won't be stuck waiting for a font to load to start consuming content.

3. Customize Font Rendering: font-display offers different strategies for displaying fonts as they're loaded, giving you more control over the rendering process.

How to Leverage the font-display Feature?

The font-display property can take several values, each providing a different way to handle font loading. Here's how to use them:

1. Auto: This uses the browser's default font loading strategy.

   @font-face {
     font-family: 'CustomFont';
     src: url('customfont.woff2') format('woff2');
     font-display: auto;
   }

2. Block: This creates a short block period during which the text will be invisible while the custom font is loading. If it takes too long, a fallback font is used.

   font-display: block;

3. Swap: This immediately uses a fallback font and swaps it with the custom font once it's loaded.

   font-display: swap;

4. Fallback: This allows a short block period and then uses the fallback font. If the custom font loads quickly, it will be swapped in.

   font-display: fallback;

5. Optional: This makes the custom font entirely optional. If it doesn't load quickly, the fallback font is used, and the custom font isn't used at all.

   font-display: optional;

Tips:

• Choose the Right Value: Consider the importance of the custom font to your design and the potential loading time to choose the most appropriate value for font-display.

• Test Across Browsers: Different browsers may handle these settings slightly differently, so test across various browsers to ensure a consistent experience.

• Consider Font Loading Libraries: If you need more control over font loading, consider using a font loading library that gives you even more customization options.

Conclusion:

Leveraging the font-display CSS feature is a straightforward but powerful way to control how web fonts load on your site. By choosing the right strategy for your content and design, you can significantly improve the user experience and potentially boost the performance of your site.