@mannixmarketing
Fonts Preloading should add a preload link in the head section of your website to ensure faster loading for those resources. If you are experiencing issues with the preloading it would be best to open a Helpdesk Request through your SiteGround Client Area so our support team can review the case and provide more information.
Best Regards,
Stefan Stefanov
After reaching out to SiteGround support, it turns out the “Web Fonts Optimization” feature needs to be enabled along with the URLs being added to the “Preload Fonts” section. This is a bit counter intuitive to their documentation that says the “Web Fonts Optimization” is for locally loading Google Fonts, not about preloading local fonts.
When asked if the two could exist outside of each other, their response:
The font optimization and the font preloading are interconnected options. With the optimization feature enabled, we open a buffer, get all link tags that point to Google fonts, and start optimizing them. We make a request to Google to get the generated CSS which actually includes the fonts, and then save it in the wp-content/uploads/siteground-optimizer-assets/google-fonts folder of your site. Next, we load that content inline in the head part of the page. Without this option being enabled, the preloading of fonts will not work.
Seems strange that they couldn’t/wouldn’t separate the two from each other.