Preload font-awesome

Question

I am trying to pre-load font-awesome to improve my page load times:

<link rel="preload" as="style" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/css/font-awesome.min.css"/>
<link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2?v=4.3.0"/>

However...Chrome seems to download the font twice and reports

The resource http://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2?v=4.3.0 was preloaded using link preload but not used within a few seconds from the window's load event. Please make sure it wasn't preloaded for nothing.

How do I get this to work?

Answer 1

You must add the crossorigin attribute when preloading fonts.

    <link rel="preload" as="style" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/css/font-awesome.min.css"/>
    <link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2?v=4.3.0"/>

Answer 2

Along with marking a link as a preload stylesheet with rel="preload" (what you already did), we also need to use JavaScript to toggle the rel attribute to stylesheet when the file loads:

<link rel="preload" as="style" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/css/font-awesome.min.css" onload="this.rel='stylesheet'"/>
<link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2?v=4.3.0"/>

Answer 3

It can be loading it twice because of the order you are doing preload.

<link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff2?v=4.3.0"/>
<link rel="preload" as="style" href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.3.0/css/font-awesome.min.css" onload="this.rel='stylesheet'"/>

Preload the font first so that, css @font-face does not send a request again to load it.