Google Fonts Unstable in China - Here is How to Fix It

Update on September 9, 2016

WARNING: Starting from August 31, 2016, Qihoo 360 has stopped fonts.useso.com and all mirrored fonts hosted under fonts.useso.com stop working now.

At the same time, Google has fixed Google Fonts, which now directly serves the css and font files from Google’s servers in Beijing, which means Google Fonts are much more stable and faster to users in China now.

I recommend all webmasters who have been using fonts.useso.com switch back to the original Google Fonts as soon as possible.

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Since June, the instability of Google’s services has reached a whole new level in China. Google Web Search and Gmail were accessible very occasionally before that, but now it’s safe to say they are almost totally unusable.

Moreover, a new victim has joined the list this time – Google Fonts.

Google Fonts is a free font service that makes it very easy to integrate beautiful and cross-browser fonts into websites.

However, with it blocked in China, although your website has installed Google Fonts, it will not work properly on your site.

What’s worse, your site’s load speed will also be affected, because your website contains an external source that is blocked and takes very long to load.

So How to Fix This Mess?

Luckily, fixing this is easy. Qihoo 360 has offered a free mirror of Google Fonts on their own CDN servers across China.

For example, below is the original code on your site:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Then you can simply change it to the following, to switch to Qihoo 360’s mirror:

<link href='http://fonts.useso.com/css?family=Open+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Now your site will be even faster to your Chinese audience, since the new css and font files are on 360’s own CDN in China.

#google

performance optimization

So How to Fix This Mess?

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