Use of font frameworks for EVERY text style on page and performance?

Question

We plan on using the Google font framework to handle fonts. My question is, is it OK to apply the font style to every instance of text (e.g., paragraphs and other "regular" text") or should it be used sparingly in places such as headers and other callouts? I'm curious about the performance of the page after it has been rendered (or during render) once the style has been applied to literally all the text on a page. Thanks.

Answer 1

Once the browser has requested the font to Google, you use it as it if was a local font, so just 1 request for all the text in your website. So: no latency on applying the font style to your text, just apply it to your body element as a normal font (after the correct import obviously).

Anyway, for speed reasons, i would always recommend to locally download the font, because the first time you load your website, you sometimes have to make request to different services (google, facebook, twitter and so on), each one causing a request, possibly slowing down the first load. This is generally an optimization you can do later.

Just try the two possible ways and check.