Do Google Fonts Slow Down Your Site?

[jeeyer]

Hi Guys,
I just did a webpage speed test on http://www.webpagetest.org to see how our site is performing.
I noticed that an exteral URL called fonts.gstatic.com has a "huge" impact on our sites loading time.

See a screen here: http://monosnap.com/image/z6drzC2ELoJ48d1rM0Tmtuszl3pFpH#
An overview can be seen here: http://monosnap.com/image/9hofUpr5Ld8D7mi7zyaJmGFIGhpBsY#

All our scores are green and A (finally!) but I was a bit concerned when I saw the outcome of the pagespeedtest regarding the fonts.
When I load a page on my pc I indeed notice that the text content is usally quite slow in showing up, pops up afer a few seconds.

Is this a know problem and Is this something I need to fix? If so what is the best approach?

Looking forward on your thoughts!
Joost

[AlanMosley]

That's depends.

Visitors to your site have fonts on there computer already, using these fonts will give you the best load speed, you can look up "web safe fonts" to find these.
Using non web safe fonts means downloading font objects, now wether these are downloaded from your web server or from google they still have to be downloaded, if you have a fast server it may be better to host the font objects yourself, if not you may be better downloading from google.
Me myself, if I use non web safe fonts I like to host them myself, I don't like having any third part resources on my sites.
Thanks