WordPress pages load very slowly after Google is blocked

After Google is completely blocked in China since May 31, I’ve had problems loading my website. After some investigation I found out the problem lies in loading failure of Google Fonts. Since it takes a long time to fail, the page waits before it fails and display with the fallback styles.

To solve the problem, I crawled the font styles from Google and put it up on my server. Then I changed the WordPress theme to use the font style on the server. Everything seems to work perfectly after that.

Another option would be completely disable Google Font Styles. This can be easily done using the WP plugin “Disable Google Fonts”, if you’re using WP’s default twenty-* themes. In my case, I would have to comment out two lines in Mog Theem Functions file (functions.php). Since my theme relies on Google Fonts, instead of commenting out the lines, I changed these to lines to use the localized style file:

	//wp_enqueue_style( 'opensans', 'http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans');
	//wp_enqueue_style( 'josefinslab', 'http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Josefin+Slab:600');
	wp_enqueue_style( 'opensans', '/gfonts.css');
	wp_enqueue_style( 'josefinslab', '/gfonts.css');