Rural Blog does not use Google Fonts, and cannot be made to. Every face in every dropdown is either already on the visitor’s device or served from your own domain.
Why
Speed. A webfont from a third party is a DNS lookup, a TLS handshake, a connection and a download, all on the critical path before your text can be painted with the right letters. A system stack is zero of those.
Privacy and law. Requesting a font from another company’s server sends your visitor’s IP address to that company. German courts have ruled that doing so without consent breaches the GDPR, and it is a live risk in the EU generally. Themes on WordPress.org are also required not to bundle remote assets.
Reliability. A font that is not fetched cannot fail to be fetched.
What you get instead
The system default
The visitor’s operating-system UI font — San Francisco on Apple, Segoe on Windows, Roboto on Android. It is the fastest option and it always looks native. This is the theme’s default for both the base and heading roles.
Nine built-in stacks
Each resolves against fonts virtually every device already has, so there is nothing to download.
| Choice | Reads as |
|---|---|
| Helvetica / Arial | The neutral grotesque |
| Verdana | Wide, very legible at small sizes |
| Tahoma | Narrower than Verdana |
| Trebuchet MS | Friendly, slightly humanist |
| Georgia | A serif designed for screens. The best serif on this list |
| Times New Roman | The default serif; dated but honest |
| Palatino | An old-style serif, warmer than Georgia |
| Courier New | Typewriter monospace |
| Monospace (system) | The device’s own code font |
For a text blog, Georgia for body and a sans for headings — or the reverse — covers most of what people reach for Google Fonts to achieve.
Anything you install yourself
WordPress 7.0 and later ships the Font Library at Appearance → Fonts. Any family you install there is stored in your own uploads directory, served from your own domain, and appears in every one of the theme’s font dropdowns. The theme emits the @font-face rules for it automatically, with font-display: swap.
That includes fonts from Google — downloaded and self-hosted, which keeps the typeface and drops the third-party request. See Add a custom font.
If you really want a remote font
You can enqueue one from a child theme. Nothing stops you, and the theme will use it if you name the family in a CSS override. But you are trading away the property that makes the theme fast, and on an EU-facing site you are taking on a consent obligation. Self-hosting the same file through the Font Library gets you the same letters with none of that.