next-google-fonts

A tiny next/head helper for loading Google Fonts fast and asynchronously ⏩

Using Next.js 10? See "How does this compare to Next.js font optimization?" before continuing.

Table of Contents

1. Setup
2. FAQs

Setup

In this example, we're going to add Inter (specifically weights 400 and 700) to a Next.js app.

See joebell.co.uk for a working example.

1. Add the package to your Next.js project:

   npm i next-google-fonts
   

2. Create a custom Head component.

   It's important to acknowledge that next-google-fonts is a small next/head component and should not be nested inside next/head. To solve this, wrap both components with a Fragment.

   // components/head.js
   import * as React from "react";
   import NextHead from "next/head";
   import { GoogleFonts } from "next-google-fonts";
   
   export const Head = ({ children, title }) => (
     <React.Fragment>
       <GoogleFonts href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:[email protected];700&display=swap" />
       <NextHead>
         <meta charSet="UTF-8" />
         <meta
           name="viewport"
           content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"
         />
         <meta httpEquiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge" />
   
         <title>{title}</title>
   
         {children}
       </NextHead>
     </React.Fragment>
   );
   

3. Add the requested Google Font/s to your styles with a sensible fallback. It really doesn't matter whether you're using CSS or Sass or CSS-in-JS:

   body {
     font-family: "Inter", sans-serif;
   }
   

4. Run your Next.js app to see the results in action!

   You should expect to see the fallback font first, followed by a switch to the Google Font/s without any render-blocking CSS warnings. Your font/s will continue to display until your app is re-hydrated.

   If JS is disabled, only the fallback font will display.

FAQs

• How does this compare to Next.js font optimization?
• Why?

How does this compare to Next.js font optimization?

Next.js 10 introduced automatic Google Font optimization, you can make a decision on which solution to use based on the following criteria:

• "My fonts are not priority and can be loaded asynchronously" - use next-google-fonts.
• "My fonts are priority and should not be loaded asynchronously" - use Next.js font optimization.

For further reading, see the Next.js issue discussion.

Why?

next-google-fonts aims to make the process of using Google Fonts in Next.js more consistent, faster and painless: it preconnects to font assets, preloads and asynchronously loads the CSS file.

In the current iteration of next/head, we can't make use of the familiar "media hack" method of asynchronous Google font loading:

<!-- Plain HTML -->
<link
  rel="stylesheet"
  href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:[email protected];700&display=swap"
  media="print"
  onload="this.media='all'"
/>

If you'd like to track this issue in Next.js, you can follow it here: Next.js#12984.