The 2025 State of Web Typography: A Data-Driven Analysis
A data-driven analysis of the current state of web typography, drawing on the comprehensive crawl data from the 2025 HTTP Archive Web Almanac.
Introduction: From Adoption to Optimization
A little over a decade ago, in 2011, custom web fonts were a nascent technology, found on a mere 3–5% of websites[1]. The web’s visual landscape was largely uniform, constrained by a small set of “web-safe” system fonts. Today, that landscape is unrecognizable. Web fonts have reached near-ubiquity, with approximately 88% of all websites[2] now employing them to craft distinct visual identities and enhance readability.
This widespread adoption signals a fundamental shift in the challenges facing web developers and designers. The central question is no longer whether to use web fonts, but how to deliver them efficiently and leverage their full expressive potential. Performance, privacy, and advanced typographic control have become the primary areas of focus in a mature ecosystem.
This article provides a data-driven analysis of the current state of web typography, drawing on the comprehensive crawl data from the 2025 HTTP Archive Web Almanac. We will explore the strategic shift toward self-hosting, the consolidation of font file formats, the maturing use of CSS rendering techniques, and the adoption rates of advanced features like variable and color fonts.
The data reveals a landscape of refinement and convergence, where best practices are solidifying, and new technologies are emerging to solve the next generation of typographic challenges.
1. The Font Delivery Architecture: A Strategic Shift to Self-Hosting
The choice of font delivery architecture is a critical engineering decision with profound implications for performance, privacy, and infrastructure dependency.
For years, the calculus was simple: third-party services like Google Fonts offered convenience and the performance benefit of a shared, cross-site cache. However, this assumption has been fundamentally altered by modern browser architectures.
With the introduction of network state partitioning, shared caches across domains are no longer available. As a result, third-party CDNs no longer provide the performance advantage they once did.
The 2025 data shows a clear and rational response from performance-conscious engineers: a steady and deliberate shift toward self-hosting.
The Dominance of Self-Hosting [3]
Approximately 72% of websites now use self-hosted fonts in some capacity, marking a continued migration away from exclusive reliance on third-party services.
This is not a stylistic trend — it is a direct reaction to:
- loss of shared caching benefits
- increased privacy concerns
- desire for tighter control over the rendering path
Breakdown of Primary Hosting Models [4]
| Hosting Model | Prevalence (Mobile/Desktop Average) |
|---|---|
| Exclusively Self-Hosted | ~34% (36.4% mobile, 31.5% desktop) |
| Mixed Hosting (Self + Service) | ~34% (31.7% mobile, 36.1% desktop) |
| Exclusively Third-Party Service | ~28% |
The most significant insight lies in the growth of exclusive self-hosting, which increased from roughly 30% in 2024 to about 34% in 2025.
This indicates a decisive shift: more site owners now believe that the benefits of full ownership outweigh the convenience of hosted services.
The Third-Party Service Landscape [5]
Despite the migration toward self-hosting, third-party services still play a major role.
- Google Fonts remains dominant, appearing on ~54% of desktop and ~47% of mobile sites, though its share continues to decline year over year.
- Adobe Fonts occupies a small but growing niche (~3.8%), serving teams seeking high-quality commercial typefaces.
- Font Awesome continues a slow decline (3–4%), largely due to the shift toward inline SVG icons.
- Other services (Fonts.com, Type Network, etc.) are now statistically negligible at web scale.
Deconstructing Hosting Combinations [6]
In practice, the web has converged on three dominant setups:
- Google Fonts only
- Self-hosted only
- Google Fonts + self-hosted
Year-over-year data shows fewer sites hedging between the two models. Instead, more teams are making a clear decision to own their font pipeline entirely.
This growing confidence in self-hosting is tightly coupled with performance optimization — particularly the efficiency of modern font formats.
2. Performance Engineering for Modern Typography [7]
In 2025, typographic performance is primarily governed by two levers:
- Font file formats
- Transfer size optimization
File Format Consolidation
The web has decisively standardized around WOFF2, prized for its superior compression.
| Format | Share of Requests |
|---|---|
| WOFF2 | 65% |
| WOFF | 16% |
| TTF | ~6.7% |
| application/octet-stream | ~6.6% |
Together, WOFF and WOFF2 account for 81% of all font requests, signaling a mature and stable industry standard.
The persistent presence of application/octet-stream is not a format choice, but a configuration failure — indicating missing or incorrect MIME types on self-hosted servers.
While self-hosting offers greater control, it also introduces greater responsibility. Misconfigured servers remain one of the most common performance pitfalls.
Font File Size Distribution
While compression has improved, file size still matters:
- Median (P50): ~35–40 KB
- 75th percentile: ~76–77 KB
- 90th percentile: ~115–116 KB
- 99th percentile: several hundred KB
The long tail of extremely large fonts is dominated by:
- un-subsetted CJK fonts
- large icon fonts
- fonts containing full Unicode ranges
This makes subsetting a critical optimization technique for a non-trivial share of sites.
3. Advanced Loading and Rendering Controls [8]
Modern CSS offers increasingly precise control over how fonts are loaded and rendered.
Resource Hints
| Resource Hint | Desktop Usage | Trend |
|---|---|---|
| preconnect | 18.3% | Stable and preferred |
| dns-prefetch | 14.6% | Declining |
| preload | 12.0% | Slowly rising |
preconnect has effectively replaced dns-prefetch, while preload adoption reflects a growing understanding of prioritizing critical fonts.
The font-display Property
The font-display descriptor is now mainstream:
- swap (~50%) dominates body text and UI usage, prioritizing content visibility.
- block (~25%) remains common for icon fonts, where preventing FOIT avoids broken UI elements.
This bifurcation reflects a mature, intentional use of rendering strategies rather than blind defaults.
4. The Typographic Supply Chain [9]
Most Prevalent Font Families
CSS declarations reveal a familiar hierarchy:
- Roboto — 10–10.7% of pages
- Font Awesome — 8.5–9.3% (icons)
- Poppins, Open Sans, Montserrat — ubiquitous text fonts
- Inter — rapidly growing, especially in modern UI design
System Fonts
System fonts remain foundational:
sans-seriffallback appears on ~89% of pagessystem-uiis used on ~9–10% of sites
Using system fonts provides:
- zero network cost
- native OS feel
- excellent performance
This reflects a growing appreciation for restraint in typographic design.
Foundries and Licensing
Font metadata reveals heavy concentration:
- Google fonts appear on ~34% of sites
- Font Awesome on ~29%
Licensing metadata quality remains poor:
- ~50% of pages include fonts with blank or unrecognized license fields.
Among recognized licenses, one dominates:
- SIL Open Font License (OFL) — used on ~64–65% of websites
This confirms that the visible web typography layer is overwhelmingly built on open-source fonts.
5. The Expanding Frontier [10]
Global Script Coverage
Latin and Private Use Area glyphs remain dominant (~54%), but global script support continues to expand:
- Cyrillic: ~13%
- Greek: ~8%
- Japanese: ~1.4%
- Hebrew: ~1.2%
- Korean: ~1.0%
- Arabic: ~0.9%
Open-source initiatives — especially Google Noto (“No more tofu”) — drive much of this progress.
A major unresolved challenge remains Chinese typography, where massive glyph sets create prohibitive file sizes.
A promising future solution is Incremental Font Transfer (IFT), enabling glyph-on-demand delivery.
Variable Fonts
Variable fonts are now mainstream:
- Desktop: 39.4%
- Mobile: 41.3%
Growth is driven largely by:
- Roboto
- Open Sans
- Montserrat
- Noto Sans JP
Most usage remains conservative, focusing on the wght axis for performance consolidation rather than expressive typography.
More advanced axes (wdth, slnt, opsz) remain underutilized outside icon systems like Material Symbols.
Color Fonts and OpenType Features
- Color fonts appear on only ~0.05–0.06% of sites
- Usage is dominated by emoji (Noto Color Emoji)
- COLRv1 adoption is rising but remains niche
OpenType features are widely present in font files (>61%) but rarely activated via CSS, except for practical cases like tabular numbers.
6. Conclusion: A Landscape of Refinement and Convergence
The state of web typography in 2025 is defined not by disruption, but by refinement.
The data from the 2025 Web Almanac highlights several clear trends:
- Self-hosting is ascending as developers seek performance and privacy control.
- WOFF2 has fully consolidated as the dominant delivery format.
- Variable fonts are mainstream, primarily as performance primitives.
- CSS loading strategies have matured, reflecting deliberate engineering choices.
- Global language support continues to expand, driven by open-source efforts.
Looking ahead, the next major leap is likely to come from technologies targeting massive character sets — particularly Incremental Font Transfer (IFT).
If successful, IFT may finally solve the long-standing performance barrier for CJK typography, unlocking a new era of expressive, global, and performant text on the web.
Typography is no longer a question of adoption.
It is a question of optimization, responsibility, and intent.