YOOtheme Pro 1.13 – Unsplash and Local Google Fonts

Hanna
July 5, 2018
Page Builder

Today we are happy to introduce YOOtheme Pro 1.13. It has two great new features on board. We've integrated the fantastic Unsplash image library into YOOtheme Pro. Now you can browse a huge library of beautiful photos and load them directly into your layouts. Also, many of you have concerns regarding the use of Google Fonts and the GDPR. We solved this discussion once and for all! All used Google Fonts are now automatically stored on your local web server and loaded from there.

Integrated Unsplash Library

We have been working on this feature for a long time, and we are really excited about it! Unsplash is a huge library of quality and free-to-use photos, and starting from today, it's seamlessly integrated into the media manager of YOOtheme Pro. Instead of downloading images to your computer and then uploading them again to your website, you can now directly insert images into your layouts. Trying out different images is easy as can be. Once your layout is finished, and you click Save, the Unsplash images will be downloaded to your media folder. It's a real time-saver and will greatly speed up your design workflow. To provide the same user experience as on the Unsplash website, you can not only filter images, but also search collections and users and browse their photos.

We have even created image collections for all our YOOtheme Pro themes. Simply go to the Users, and choose YOOtheme. There you will find every photo from every theme.

YOOtheme Unsplash Collections

For now the Unsplash library is only available for the Developer subscriptions since we have just a limited number of requests to the Unsplash API.

Local Google Fonts

YOOtheme Pro now stores Google Fonts locally. This happens automatically when you select a Google font in the Style Customizer. The woff and woff2 font files are downloaded to your web server and are included into the CSS. This means the font is loaded from your own server, and no requests to the Google Fonts server are sent.

This has two advantages. First, it will boost your Google PageSpeed. There is no round-trip to the Google server anymore. Even better, if your web server supports HTTP/2, there is no additional round-trip for the font at all. The first meaningful paint will appear a few seconds earlier! This is a huge speed improvement. And secondly, this will stop the discussion on whether or not Google Fonts are GDPR-compliant once and for all. With local Google Fonts, the privacy of your visitors is guaranteed.

Note After updating your website, just open the Style Customizer, and all used Google Fonts will be automatically stored locally.

What's Next?

Now that our website relaunch is completed, we can focus on YOOtheme Pro. Most importantly, we have to update it to the latest Vue version 2.5 and refactor the page builder framework. This will allow us to add much anticipated features to YOOtheme Pro. More about this soon. Now take YOOtheme Pro for a test drive and let us know what you think.