Full Site Check now scans for Google Fonts

360 Monitoring Team

2 years ago

Earlier this year, you might have heard that a German court ruled that embedding Google Fonts on your website without the user’s consent could be against the law. This is because the user’s IP is passed directly to Google when the file is downloaded. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR, classifies user IPs as personally identifiable information (PII). So the website operator must obtain the user’s explicit consent.

But don’t worry, there are solutions how to handle this issue:

Embed the fonts locally
Use another source without IP tracking

For the first solution, there are plenty of manuals, guides, and even plugins for your favorite CMS. For the second alternative, there are services like https://fonts.coollabs.io/, that allows you to replace the Google part of the URL with their own privacy-focused CND. So you can continue using the fonts on your website.

How to find Google Fonts

Now that we’ve learned how to change websites so that they no longer use Google servers to load fonts, there’s still the big unknown of where.
Especially as an agency, it’s hard to get an overview of all projects, websites, and subpages and know where Google Fonts might be integrated. To help you with this, the 360 Monitoring Team has extended the Full Site Check and now also checks whether a website still embeds the fonts directly from the Google CDN:

Once you received your report, it’s time to fix the embeddings. As soon as and once you’re done, we recommend starting to crawl over again to make sure everything is now fixed.

What's next?

Integrating a Google Fonts check was a step forward, but we’re not done yet.

Let us know in the comments what checks we should introduce in the future to help you be more productive.