Custom Fonts worth the hassle?

Hey everyone, thought some of you might know a little more about this than me.

I am stuck between using a custom font or a normal font for my website. The custom font looks truly amazing and brings more life to my site, but it is 300kb big. And with pagespeed and loadtimes having such a major role in SEO and PPC, is it even worth it?

Would it be better to use a google font instead?

I'd love to hear what your suggestions are in regards to fonts and page speed.

Cheerios

Personally I don't use custom fonts for the reason you stated above - load time. However, if you realise its increasing your CTR by a % then get a better server and change that!

Yes, your right in first testing to see if the custom font even has a positive affect on ctr.

But it just looks so sleek and unique. So I took the font, stuck it in font forge, got rid of all the extranious text that I would never use on the site, then generated the font as a true type.

This took the font down from 620 kb to 121. So I am pretty pleased. However, when I read that the average size for google webfonts is 30 kb (not compressed), I am now somewhat certain that I can get my custom font file size EVEN SMALLER.

But as I randomly test different settings, can someone enlighten me as to how google is able to make their font sizes so small?

Is there something I'm missing here? Aren't "custom fonts" very ineffective considering they can't even be seen by most users unless they have that font installed on their computer? Unless you guys are talking about imagery or some type of font that isn't very "custom".

Aside from that, I wouldn't bother with adding 300KB for a font if your main focus is ranking on Google. That is pretty huge.