Font Awesome & Google Fonts Settings - Oxilab

The Flipbox plugin can automatically load Font Awesome (for icons) and Google Fonts (for custom typography) on pages where your flip boxes are displayed. These settings are found in Flipbox → Settings and each has a simple Yes/No toggle.

Understanding when to enable or disable these settings is important for both functionality and site performance.

Font Awesome Settings

What Font Awesome Does in Flipbox

Font Awesome is the icon library that powers the icons on the front face of your flip box cards. If you use icons in any of your flip boxes, Font Awesome must be loaded on those pages for the icons to display correctly.

Load Font Awesome: Yes (Default)

With this enabled, Flipbox automatically adds the Font Awesome CSS to any page that renders a flip box shortcode. This is the safest option and ensures icons always display correctly.

Load Font Awesome: No

Disable this if your WordPress theme or another plugin already loads Font Awesome. Loading the same library twice wastes bandwidth and can cause version conflicts (your theme might load FA 6, while Flipbox loads FA 5, causing icon rendering differences).

How to Know If Your Theme Already Loads Font Awesome

Open your website in a browser.
Right-click and choose View Page Source (or press Ctrl+U / Cmd+U).
Search (Ctrl+F) for font-awesome or fontawesome.
If you see a Font Awesome CSS file being loaded, your theme already loads it.

Alternatively, disable the Flipbox Font Awesome setting, save, and check if your flip box icons still show. If they do, your theme is loading Font Awesome. If they disappear, turn the setting back on.

Google Fonts Settings

What Google Fonts Does in Flipbox

When you set a custom font family in your flip box typography settings (e.g., “Montserrat” for the front heading), Flipbox needs to load the Google Fonts CSS to make that font available in the browser. If Google Fonts loading is disabled, custom fonts won’t render — the browser will fall back to a generic system font instead.

Load Google Fonts: Yes (Default)

Flipbox automatically loads the Google Font CSS for any fonts you’ve configured in your flip boxes. This is the recommended setting if you’re using Google Fonts in Flipbox.

Load Google Fonts: No

Disable this if:

Your theme already loads the same Google Fonts you’re using in Flipbox
You’re using a performance plugin (like Perfmatters or Asset CleanUp) that manages font loading centrally
You prefer to load fonts via a custom method for GDPR compliance reasons

GDPR note: Google Fonts requests are made directly from the user’s browser to Google’s servers, which can be considered a data transfer under GDPR regulations in some EU jurisdictions. If this is a concern for your site, disable Google Fonts loading in Flipbox and host the fonts locally instead (self-hosted fonts can be loaded via your theme or custom CSS).

Troubleshooting Font Issues

Problem	Likely Cause	Fix
Icons not showing on frontend	Font Awesome not loading	Set “Load Font Awesome” to Yes in settings
Icons show different style than expected	Version conflict between FA loaded by theme and Flipbox	Disable Flipbox’s FA and let the theme load it
Custom Google Font not appearing	Google Fonts loading disabled	Set “Load Google Fonts” to Yes in settings
Page loads slowly	Font Awesome or Google Fonts loaded twice	Disable Flipbox’s loading if theme already loads them