IMproving fonts performance

In trying to improve the performance of my site recently I ran PageSpeed Insights and noted that several fonts were marked as needing the “fontDisplay”: “swap” directive, notably Jost and Cardo and one used for theme messages. adding this directive to my child theme took my PSI score from 78 to 90 for mobiles. Since PSI seems to require this directive for all fonts it seems to me a good idea that it should be included in the theme.json parent, and not require the website owner to add them in later, especially since it’s such a staggering increase in performance.

For the record I’m self hosting on an Ubuntu 24.04 VPS the latest WordPress and the 2025 theme. I achieved a speed uprate from 63 to 78 by getting rid of Plesk, which also massively improved my overall server performance – a reboot time of 40 seconds from restart to site available was reduced to 7 seconds. I’m working on a extremely lightweight server-admin tool to help out with server admin tasks