Do search engines treat masked text differently than solid color fonts?

[kwoolf]

In my attempt to decrease page load times, I ditched my custom fonts for google fonts. I figured out how to apply CSS mask-image to make this blazing fast loading google font have a chalk texture, which was an awesome improvement over the 3-5 second load times for those locally hosted web fonts.

I've read that Google penalize a site for poor contrast ratios between the background and text, but do search engines go by CSS or do they somehow compare the actual rendered site as an image? Using CSS mask-image to give my text that chalk appearance does produce minor transparent patches in text.

So have I saved 3 seconds on page load just to have search engines knock points off for funky text issues? All input welcome. The temporary site is here. https://website-1b14f.firebaseapp.com/

Kevin

[Guest]

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[kwoolf]

Thank for your thoughts. You're right that I can't find a single article on this anywhere, but I've never been conservative when I comes to SEO. I'm always looking to see what's possible. I concluded that since unsupported browsers will simply display the original text without the mask-image (Firefox/Opera), I'm going to assume google search bots won't care about the image mask either.

On the SEO side, this method shaves 3 to 5 seconds off load times, so that can't be bad. The effects are amazing, even on Chinese fonts. I'll report back after launch and post here.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Kevin,

Have you launched yet? We'd love an update on this!

Christy

[kwoolf]

Site not launched yet but no warnings on any SEO tools. You can run this site through any tests you want and see. https://website-1b14f.firebaseapp.com/

Schema all good and AMP valid. Content coming up next... FYI this is not a public site and content will change as we test new designs and functionality.

[kwoolf]

Hi Christy,

Site launched! The e-commerce part is still under development but the basic site has been up a couple months. Masked text doing great! No issues whatsoever on the SEO side. Ranking super high still and load speeds are good. Service workers will be activated in the coming weeks as we build out our food delivery platform. So, I'll mark my question as answered. https://www.88k.com.tw