The right fonts make your website’s text pop while keeping content readable and accessible.
It’s tempting to focus on flashy colors and visuals when building a website, but text is just as vital. If you want to get your message across, you need typefaces that look good, are appropriate for your brand, and are easy to understand at a glance.
Google Fonts offers a large collection of free, open-source fonts designed for websites and other digital content. Fonts are organized using tags that tell you about their design and intended use cases. The only problem is that, with so many options in Google’s database, it can be hard to know where to start.
In this article, we’ll provide some recommendations to point you in the right direction. Each of these top Google fonts for websites is optimized for online use and widely supported by popular browsers.
12 Google fonts for your website
Here are 12 of the best free Google fonts, organized by where they work best in website designs.
Readable fonts for body text
Body text is the most challenging element to get right, because it needs to be legible on small mobile screens while adding character to your website. Sans-serif fonts are usually best for body text, because they don’t have embellishments that can make small letters harder to read.
1. Open Sans
Tags: Sans Serif – Humanist | Feeling – Business
Open Sans is a sans-serif font with even spacing and consistent stroke weights, which helps it maintain clear legibility on small screens. This font’s gentle curves and unembellished letters make it a great choice for long-form content like blogs and news articles, where more complex fonts might cause eye strain.
2. Roboto
Tags: Sans serif – Neo Grotesque | Feeling – Competent
Roboto is Google’s default font for Android, and its size and spacing are similar to Apple’s default font San Francisco. Text elements that use Roboto will have a consistent size across most devices, which is crucial to mobile-first design. While this font is plain, its thick stroke weights make it great for UI elements and body text, keeping this content readable on small screens.
3. Work Sans
Tags: Sans Serif – Grotesque | Feeling – Vintage
Work Sans is a bit more stylized than other sans-serif fonts, with generous spacing and distinctive letterforms. If the style is right for your brand, Work Sans is a good web font for short blurbs on landing pages or product descriptions. However, its spacing makes this typeface less ideal for long-form content, as it takes up a lot of page real estate.
4. Lato
Tags: Sans Serif – Humanist | Feeling – Business
Lato is very similar to Open Sans, with tight spacing and a thick stroke weight. But this font adds a few unique letterforms, such as its designs for the “g” and “k.” If Open Sans is too dull for your needs, Lato lets you add a touch more flair and it’s still just as readable in long-form body text.
Aesthetic fonts for headings and UI text
Headings and titles take up extra room in web page layouts, so they can afford to focus less on legibility and more on visual appeal. Here are four fonts that pair well with the Google typefaces above.
5. Montserrat
Tags: Sans Serif – Geometric | Feeling – Calm
The Montserrat typeface has optical kerning, which means some letters hang over one another, like how the “v,” “o,” and “e” are arranged in the example above. This effect works well in display text, where larger font sizes keep letters from running together. Just avoid bolding this font, as it makes the overlap more pronounced.
6. Poppins
Tags: Sans Serif – Geometric | Feeling – Stiff
Poppins has tight, even spacing, so it fits a lot of text on each line. This font is useful if you have long headings and need to be economical about the space they take up. Poppins’ slim letters take well to bolding, so it’s also great for attracting attention, although its Thin and Light versions aren’t very readable.
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7. Raleway
Tags: Sans Serif – Humanist | Feeling – Competent
Raleway has tight spacing and optical kerning, but the stroke weight is just light enough that the letters don’t run together. This typeface also has a few unique letterforms, such as the crossed “w” and the stylized “k.” Italicized content looks particularly elegant on Raleway’s Regular and ExtraLight variants — just be careful with color contrast to ensure you don’t lose legibility.
8. Oswald
Tags: Sans Serif – Grotesque | Feeling – Vintage
Oswald is a heavy typeface that resembles newspaper and magazine fonts, with tall, thin letters and high-impact stroke weight. While it can look a little squished, and the blocky letters aren’t great for long headings, Oswald adds a lot of character to UI text and short subheadings.
Serif fonts for website branding
Serif fonts are important for more stylized websites, where the text needs embellishment to fit your design aesthetic. Here are four serif fonts with a good balance of style and readability.
9. Merriweather
Tags: Serif – Transitional | Feeling – Business
Merriweather’s typewriter-esque look uses mostly flat serifs that add a touch of character to an otherwise simple font. The Regular and Medium options have a bit of variation in stroke weight, but go with Light, Bold, or Black for a more pronounced look.
10. Playfair Display
Tags: Serif – Didone | Feeling – Vintage
Playfair Display is a highly stylized serif font with prominent variations in stroke weight. Several letterforms feature hair-thin strokes, like the straight line in the “y” and the curves of the “o” and “p.” This typeface is a stylish choice for large headings, where increased font sizes keep it from losing legibility.
11. Lora
Tags: Serif – Traditional | Feeling – Stiff
Lora is a classic typeface with traditional letterforms that help it fit into a wide variety of designs. There’s very little variation in stroke weights, but the Regular option keeps those variations just noticeable enough to work well as a decorative display font. Lora is best used for large headings and titles.
12. Source Serif 4
Tags: Serif – Transitional | Feeling – Competent
Source Serif 4 mixes traditional letterforms like “k” and “f” with slightly more modern and legible ones, such as the “e” and “h.” Source Serif 4’s prominent serifs and modest variations in stroke weights do a good job of balancing readability with visual appeal, even when used at smaller sizes for subheadings and UI elements.
How to choose the right Google fonts for your website
As you explore the Google fonts site, prioritize these factors:
- Readability and accessibility. Choose body text fonts that are highly readable, and while you can experiment more with headlines and titles, those elements must also be legible on small screens.
- Brand identity. Use Google Fonts’ tag system to select fonts with a vibe that’s consistent with your brand.
- Performance. Default fonts like Roboto and Open Sans tend to load faster because most browsers have them pre-installed. If you choose more unusual typefaces, limit them to avoid slowing down your page loading speeds.
- Language support. Most Google Fonts support 100+ languages, but make sure the typefaces you choose work with every translated version of your site.
Best practices for using Google fonts
Once you choose your fonts, here’s how to use them effectively:
- Prioritize readability. Use a color contrast analyzer to select text and background shades that keep the text readable for everyone.
- Limit font usage. Only use a few different fonts in your web designs to avoid distracting visitors with too much variation or diluting your brand image.
- Retain default spacing. Manually adjusting a typeface’s kerning or line height can lead to issues like lines and letters running together.
- Establish visual hierarchy. Keep font choices consistent in elements like headings and UI text, as this creates a hierarchy readers can quickly understand.
- Test on multiple devices. Check your designs on Android and iOS, and at common aspect ratios like 16:9 and 4:3, to make sure your designs remain responsive and legible across all screens.
Turn text and visuals into quality designs with Webflow
Selecting fonts can take some time and experimentation, since there are a lot of options with small variations. The fonts on our list are optimized for readability and generally pair well together, but the best test is to try them out in context and see how they look.
Webflow’s website experience platform helps you visualize different color and typography pairings quickly, and apply changes across your entire site. You can also fully customize page structures to draw attention to key text, and use collaboration tools to get your entire team’s input on font options.
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