The Local Google Fonts extension lets you download selected Google Fonts to your WordPress installation and serve them directly from your own web server instead of requesting them from Google’s servers.
You can choose exactly which font families, weights, styles and character subsets are stored locally, and optionally preload selected font files when they are important to the initial page render.
Blocksy Pro required
The Local Google Fonts extension requires Blocksy Companion Pro to be installed and active.
Getting Started
To activate Local Google Fonts:
- Navigate to WordPress Dashboard → Blocksy → Extensions.
- Locate and activate the Local Google Fonts extension.
- Open the extension’s settings and select the Google Fonts you want to store locally.
- Synchronise the extension to download the selected font files to your website.
Remote Google Fonts are removed
After Local Google Fonts has been activated and synchronised, remotely loaded Google Fonts are removed from Blocksy’s font selector. The Google Fonts you download through the extension are then served locally instead, helping prevent accidental use of both remote and local versions.
Managing Downloaded Fonts
After adding a font, you can fine-tune which of its files are stored locally instead of downloading every available variation.
Select Variations
Use Select Variations to choose the font weights and styles required by your website, such as regular, italic, medium or bold variations.
Keeping only the variations that are actually used reduces the number of font files stored on your server and avoids making unnecessary files available to the front end.
Character Subsets
Select the character subsets required by the languages used on your website. Available subsets depend on the selected font and can include sets such as Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic or other supported character ranges.
Only enable the subsets your content requires. This keeps the locally stored font configuration focused on the characters your website actually needs to display.
Font Preloading
The Preload tab lets you select font files that should be requested earlier by the visitor’s browser. This can be useful for fonts used by prominent content that appears immediately when a page loads.
To configure preloading, select at least one font variation and one character subset. You can preload the complete set of downloaded files or limit preloading to specific combinations of weights, styles and subsets.
Preload selectively
Preloading every available font file is usually unnecessary. Prioritise the variations needed for content visible near the top of the page and allow less important font files to load normally.
Using Local Google Fonts
Once a font has been downloaded successfully, it becomes available throughout Blocksy’s typography controls alongside the other supported font sources.
Locally hosted Google Fonts are identified by an L icon in the font selector, making them easy to distinguish from system fonts, remotely loaded Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts and Custom Fonts.
You can select them from Customiser → Typography and from other Blocksy settings that provide typography controls. They are also available to supported native WordPress blocks with typography options.
For more information about Blocksy’s font sources and global typography settings, see the Typography documentation.
Privacy Considerations
Serving Google Fonts locally removes the font requests that Blocksy would otherwise make to Google’s font servers. The required font files are delivered by your own website instead.
This can be useful when you want greater control over third-party requests made by your website. However, using Local Google Fonts does not by itself make an entire website compliant with any particular privacy regulation, since other plugins, embeds or services may still communicate with external providers.