PSA: Disable the Font Awesome icons you aren't using if you're concerned about SEO/Google PageSpeed stuff

Alternadiv

Well-known member
There's like 4+ threads on the first page of this forum management section about SEO/optimization.

I think @Kirby's new add-on Font Awesome Manager deserves a shoutout here for those that may not have seen it yet.

XenForo uses the icon font Font Awesome Pro 5 that contains over 7.000 icons of which XenForo typically uses only a few hundred.
But as all icons are included in the CSS and font files, browsers have to download the full font files and CSS which does cause a significant overhead in most cases.

By subsetting the font to include only those icons that are actually being used, the size of the font files and CSS can often be drastically reduced which does improve page loading time.
Typically, the size of the font files can be reduced by over 80%.

Using this on my forum and testing it with all other add-ons disabled and the XF default style, this is the difference it made:

Desktop without add-on:
Screen Shot 2021-06-24 at 10.09.08 AM.webp

Desktop with add-on:
Screen Shot 2021-06-24 at 10.07.09 AM.webp

Mobile without add-on:
Screen Shot 2021-06-24 at 10.09.28 AM.webp

Mobile with add-on:
Screen Shot 2021-06-24 at 10.07.03 AM.webp

👌
 
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