@manan1029 first, my sincere apologies for not getting back to you sooner! You made a good point related to the Lighthouse warning. Here’s the actual problem:
– The website is loading “Noto Serif” fonts from the following URL: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Noto+Serif%3A400%2C400i%2C700%2C700i&ver=5.4.2
– When you preloaded the fonts, you copied the paths to the .woff2 files at a specific time (in this case almost 2 weeks ago)
– What actually happens with Google Fonts stylesheets, is that they are frequently updated and now when you load the same CSS file (I mentioned above), it will still load “Noto Serif”, but the path to the .woff2 files is different now because Google changed the file to a newer version for any reason.
That’s why the feature you have used will become deprecated (very soon, most likely the next tag release) as it requires you to constantly update those values and if you could even end up with font files loaded twice (the old version and the latest one).
An effective solution would be to implement a feature that will download the font files from Google and then preload them from your website’s local files. This is because you obviously don’t have control over what Google does, as they could update those fonts whenever they want.
What you can do right now is remove those font files from “Preload Google Font Files” (within “Google Fonts” -> “Optimize Font Delivery”). This feature is only useful if you already have a CSS file (e.g. custom one in the child theme) and you’re making a direct reference to those files from https://fonts.gstatic.com/ and not via https://fonts.googleapis.com/).
Sorry about not making it clearer in the plugin and this will definitely be clarified in future tag releases.
I hope it makes sense, let me know if you have further questions! I’ll be happy to help you out!
PS: In case you will ever be interested in the Pro version, let me know and I can help you with a generous discount as an apology for not getting back to you sooner 😉
