The WordPress team is now encouraging theme authors to update their themes and switch to locally hosted webfonts instead of Google-hosted ones. The recommendation came months after a German court fined a website that uses Google-hosted webfonts for the violation of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. The decision can affect themes that use Google Fonts by enqueuing from Google CDN.
GDPR violation
More than 50 million websites are using Google-hosted webfonts.
Switching to locally hosted webfonts, enables websites to comply with GDPR. A regional court in Munich, Germany fined a website owner that uses Google Fonts €100. Google Fonts is currently hosting more than 1,300 font families used by more than 50 million websites. Using Google-hosted webfonts improves performance, but it reveals the users’ IP addresses, which is considered a violation of privacy.
The WordPress team also stated that it will be discussed further at the next meeting whether the remotely hosted font is allowed in a theme as we move forward. The team stated that authors can use the Webfont-loader package in conjunction with the webfonts API, allowing them to download Google Fonts locally and then use them in the API.