Fonts kill mobile wordpress speed and can dramatically slow down your core web vitals, hurting your rankings. I am talking about mobile sites, not desktop speed. If you want a fast loading site for speed, get rid of the following..
- Google fonts
- Font awesome
You are better off using a default system font such as Helvetica, Arial to get good results. I found great improvement.
All custom fonts must be hosted on the local server (woff) for speed.
I found twenty twentyfour theme is way better compared to other third party themes. I would go with block and FSE themes with speed in mind. You can create child theme (twenty twentyfour) and specify default system fonts in theme.json file to jump your speed.