Best Free Fonts for Websites
A website font is judged on three things a print font never faces: how it renders at fifteen pixels on an ordinary screen, how much it weighs, and whether one file covers every weight you use. The faces below are strong on all three.
The file size beside each pick is its Latin-only web font — what a site in English, Turkish or a western European language actually has to download — measured from the file on this server.
The 10, and why each is here
Inter
Drawn for screens first — tall x-height, open apertures and an optical-size axis. The safe default for product sites, dashboards and documentation.
- Sans-serif
- 9 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Latin web font 189 KB
Source Sans 3
A humanist sans that stays legible at sizes where a geometric one starts to close up, with Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese in the same family.
- Sans-serif
- 8 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Latin web font 59 KB
DM Sans
A quiet, low-contrast geometric sans that is happiest at small sizes, with an unusually wide weight range for something this restrained.
- Sans-serif
- 10 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Web font 110 KB
Figtree
Crisp in a 14px label and friendlier as it gets heavier; its capitals keep their punch on buttons where softer geometric faces go limp.
- Sans-serif
- 7 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Latin web font 24 KB
Geist
Neutral, slightly wide and unfussy — drawn at Vercel for developer products, with Cyrillic and a true italic.
- Sans-serif
- 9 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Latin web font 42 KB
Lora
A warm serif with moderate contrast that holds together as a paragraph rather than sparkling. The natural choice for a blog or a small publication.
- Serif
- 4 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Latin web font 49 KB
Newsreader
An optical-size axis running from footnote to headline, built for long reading: the spacing opens up small and tightens large without you managing it.
- Serif
- 7 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Web font 234 KB
Literata
Drawn to carry a reader through hundreds of pages on a screen, with slightly slabbed serifs that keep it from looking bookish in the bad sense.
- Serif
- 8 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Latin web font 240 KB
IBM Plex Sans
Engineered rather than neutral, with angled terminals and a width axis — and a matching serif and mono if the site needs a whole system.
- Sans-serif
- 7 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Latin web font 114 KB
Noto Sans
For sites in several scripts: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Devanagari in one family, deliberately plain so it sits beside other writing systems without clashing.
- Sans-serif
- 9 weights, variable
- Türkçe ✓
- Latin web font 241 KB
What to avoid
Display faces as body text, however good they look in a heading — they are spaced and detailed for large sizes and turn tiring in a paragraph. And be wary of the very largest variable families on pages that carry only a paragraph or two: some of the files here run past a megabyte for every alphabet and axis, which a landing page does not need.
Questions
- What is the best free font for a website?
- For interface and body text, Inter is the safest default: drawn for screens, variable, and covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese. For a reading-heavy site, a serif such as Lora or Newsreader is more comfortable across long articles.
- Should I use Google Fonts or self-host?
- Self-host when you can. Serving the WOFF2 from your own domain removes a third-party request and keeps visitors’ IP addresses off another company’s servers, which matters under the GDPR. Every font page here gives you the file and the @font-face rule.
- How many fonts should a website use?
- One or two. A variable body face and, if you want contrast, one heading face is enough for almost every site; each additional family is another download and another voice on the page.