Signals Human craft
Self-hosted typography
- Category
- Human craft
- Direction
- Pulls the score down
- Weight
- −7
What it is
Evidence of deliberate decisions. Finding this does not make a page good. It makes it deliberate, which is a different and smaller claim.
How it is weighted
This is a craft marker, so it pulls the score down rather than up — 7 points of evidence that somebody made a decision here.
Craft does double duty in the scoring. It subtracts directly, and it also damps the aesthetic categories: the more deliberate craft a page shows, the less its gradients and rounded corners are allowed to say about it.
How to earn it
Self-host the fonts with font-display: swap and preload the one used above the fold.
Where it fires
Of the homepages we scan as worked examples, this signal fired on 4:
- bbc.com 10/100 — Fonts are self-hosted rather than pulled off a CDN.
- framer.com 9/100 — Fonts are self-hosted rather than pulled off a CDN.
- replit.com 9/100 — Fonts are self-hosted rather than pulled off a CDN.
- base44.com 82/100 — Fonts are self-hosted rather than pulled off a CDN.