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Fonts often contain hundreds or even thousands of characters that a website never uses. Those extra glyphs increase font file size and slow down page loading. With FontForge, a free open-source font editor, you can remove unnecessary glyphs and significantly reduce the size of your font files.
In this FontForge tutorial, you'll learn how to remove unused glyphs and export a lightweight WOFF2 web font. For this example, we’ll optimize Inter Regular, originally 302 KB. After removing unused characters, the final file size drops to around 10 KB, nearly 30× smaller. Removing unused glyphs is one of the simplest ways to optimize font file size for websites and improve page speed.
FontForge is a free, open-source font editor used to modify and optimize font files. It allows you to:
Designers and developers often use FontForge to edit existing fonts and reduce font file size by removing characters their website doesn’t need.
FontForge works by giving you full control over the glyphs inside a font file. Each character in a font (letters, numbers, punctuation, and symbols) is stored as an individual glyph. Using FontForge, you can edit those glyphs, remove the ones you don’t need, and generate a new optimized font file.
This makes FontForge useful for tasks like:
In this tutorial, we’ll focus on removing unused glyphs to reduce font file size and improve website performance.
Most fonts include character sets for multiple languages. For example, a typical font file may contain:
If your website only uses the English alphabet, most of those glyphs are unnecessary. Removing unused glyphs is one of the simplest ways to optimize font file size and improve website performance. This becomes especially useful when you are:
Even a few optimized fonts can save hundreds of kilobytes across a website. Removing unused glyphs reduces font file size and helps optimize page speed, especially on marketing websites that load multiple fonts.
Font optimization is an important part of website performance. Large font files increase page weight and can slow down loading times, especially when a website loads multiple font families or weights.
One of the most effective ways to optimize font file size is removing unused glyphs. Many fonts include characters for dozens of languages, even if a website only needs a small subset.
Tools like FontForge allow you to edit the font file, remove unnecessary glyphs, and export a lightweight WOFF2 font that loads faster in the browser. For performance-focused websites, optimizing fonts is a simple way to reduce page weight and improve loading speed.
To remove unused glyphs in FontForge, import your font file, select the characters you want to keep, invert the selection, then remove the remaining glyphs using Encoding → Detach & Remove Glyphs before exporting the optimized font. Follow these steps to remove unused glyphs in FontForge and optimize your font file size for the web.
Download FontForge from the official website. Install the application and launch it.
Open FontForge and import the font you want to optimize. For this example we use:
Inter-Regular (302 KB)
Once the font is loaded, FontForge will display all glyphs included in the font file.
Drag the mouse to select the characters your website actually uses.
For example:
In our case we selected the English alphabet and space.
Now we need to select all glyphs we don’t want to keep. Go to:
Edit → Select → Invert Selection
FontForge will now highlight all unused glyphs in the font file.
Delete the selected glyphs. Go to:
Encoding → Detach & Remove Glyphs
This removes all unnecessary characters from the font file and keeps only the glyphs your website actually needs.
Now generate the optimized font file. Go to:
File → Generate Fonts
Choose the format:
WOFF2
WOFF2 is currently the best format for web fonts, offering excellent compression and strong browser support. During export you may see warnings (for example about em-size). In most cases these can be ignored. Your font now contains only the glyphs you selected, which significantly reduces font file size and improves page speed.
Original font size: 302 KB
Optimized font size: ~10 KB
That’s roughly 30× smaller. By removing unused glyphs, you dramatically reduce the font file size without affecting how the font looks on your website. If your website loads multiple font weights or font families, optimizing glyph sets like this can reduce total page weight by hundreds of kilobytes, sometimes even megabytes. For performance-focused websites, that’s an easy win.
Font optimization makes the most sense when:
Many websites unknowingly load large fonts containing glyphs for languages they never use. Removing those unused characters is one of the simplest ways to optimize font file size and improve performance.
Font files often contain far more glyphs than a website actually needs.By removing unused characters with FontForge, you can significantly reduce font file size and generate lightweight WOFF2 web fonts that load faster and improve overall website performance.
Even small font optimizations can noticeably improve page speed, especially on websites that use multiple font families or weights.
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To remove unused glyphs in FontForge, open the font file, select the characters you want to keep, invert the selection, then remove the remaining glyphs using Encoding → Detach & Remove Glyphs. After that, export the optimized font file.
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Yes. FontForge allows you to edit existing font files, modify glyph shapes, remove characters, and export optimized fonts for the web.
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FontForge supports several common font formats, including: TTF OTF WOFF WOFF2 These formats allow you to edit fonts and generate optimized files for websites.
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Yes. FontForge is a free and open-source font editor available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
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