Google Fonts is on millions of websites. Every page load that uses it makes a request to Google's servers before your text can appear. We tested a real font request — loading both Geist and Inter, exactly the kind of request a typical site makes — from Amsterdam, San Francisco, Montreal and Singapore, 20 times each.
Independent measurement by LatencyRadar. Not affiliated with Google.
Google Fonts loaded fast most of the time — but Amsterdam had occasional spikes that are hard to ignore. Singapore and Amsterdam both clocked around 14–16 ms on a typical request, which is excellent. San Francisco and Montreal were slower at 66–80 ms typical, which is consistent with what we've seen in other Google benchmarks. The number that stands out is Amsterdam's worst-case time: nearly 2 full seconds on a single request. That's not a slow response — that's a font your users are staring at a blank page waiting for. It happened rarely, but it happened.
This is a real font request — the exact URL a browser sends when loading Geist and Inter from Google Fonts, with multiple weights for each. This is what millions of sites trigger on every page load, including LatencyRadar itself. All 80 requests came back with a 200 OK and actual font CSS — no 404s, no errors.
The split is almost identical to other Google services we've tested: Europe and Asia are very fast, North America is slower. Singapore loaded in 14 ms typical. Amsterdam was 16 ms typical. San Francisco came in at 80 ms and Montreal at 66 ms. The pattern points to Google having font CDN infrastructure closer to users in Europe and Asia than in North America, which is counterintuitive but consistent across multiple tests.
Three cities were consistent and predictable. Singapore: 14 ms typical, 18 ms on a bad day — rock solid. Montreal: 66 ms typical, 95 ms worst case — slow but steady. San Francisco: 80 ms typical, 103 ms worst case — same pattern. Then there's Amsterdam: 16 ms typical, which is excellent, but a p95 of 159 ms and a worst-case of 1,749 ms. That's not a typo. One in every 20 requests from Amsterdam took between 159 ms and nearly 2 seconds, while the other 19 were under 20 ms. That kind of spread — fast almost always, occasionally very slow — is the hardest performance problem to debug, because it's invisible until a real user hits it.
In Singapore, the entire request — connection, security handshake, server response, download — completes in under 18 ms. In San Francisco and Montreal, the connection and handshake alone take 30–40 ms before Google's server even starts responding. In Amsterdam, the connection is fast (under 3 ms), which makes the occasional 1,700 ms server response even stranger — the network isn't the problem, something in Google's response path from that edge location occasionally stalls. DNS was zero everywhere.
Start with the headline number for each city. Open the technical breakdown only if you want to see where that time is coming from.
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
If 1 in 20 of your European users hits a 1,749 ms font delay, your page text is invisible for nearly 2 seconds for that user — while everything else on the page has already loaded. They see a blank or invisible text block, assume something is broken, and leave. It won't show up in your average load time metrics. It won't trigger an alert. You'll never know it happened unless you're specifically measuring worst-case times from European locations. That's exactly what this kind of test is for.
We made a real Google Fonts CSS request — loading Geist (5 weights) and Inter (4 weights) — from servers in 4 cities: Amsterdam, San Francisco, Montreal and Singapore. Each city ran 20 requests. We measured how long each step took and calculated typical and worst-case times from the results. All requests returned HTTP 200 with valid font CSS.
This benchmark found Amsterdam requests that usually took 16 ms occasionally stretching to 1,749 ms. Run a test on your own site and see whether your European users are hitting the same kind of font delay.
Takes about 30 seconds.