A cruel irony, as their own Google Fonts (easily the most-used repository of custom fonts on the web) don’t offer any way to use font-display. It’s such a big deal that Google’s own Pagespeed Insights / Lighthouse will ding you for not using it. Loading web fonts is tricky stuff and having a tool like this that works as well as it does is a big deal for the web. It goes a long way, all by itself, for improving the perceived performance of web font loading. The font-display descriptor in blocks is really great. Zach Leatherman notes there are still some things to wish for, like stable URL’s for the fonts so we could link up the fonts in our own CSS, preventing the double-hop needed right now. If you’re copying code from Google Fonts now, it’s the default, so you get it automatically, but you might want to add it if you have existing URLs to Google fonts lingering around, or you want to change it to something like optional if you prefer that. To use font-display with Google Fonts, you include a URL parameter like &display=swap in the URL, like. Hey! This whole article is about a time before May 2019 in which Google Fonts didn’t offer a way to use font-display without self-hosting the fonts.
