Blog Awesome

Introducing: Build Awesome

2026-05-07T17:40:36Z

I really love surprise parties. I’m just so frickin’ excited!

We’ve been holding something in for a long time. And well, to be honest, our tummies hurt just a little. TLDR; Now you can help fund the Build Awesome Kickstarter!

To be honest, holding in this news was kinda like trying not to spoil a surprise party while the guest of honor keeps asking why there are balloons poking out of the closet. (We see you, Surprise Party Sue.)

The Kickstarter is live, and you’re invited into the test kitchen. Back the project, nab all the goodies, and help us ship a better long-term recipe for building on the web.

The Build Awesome Kickstarter is Live!

Build Awesome is our answer to a problem every web person knows deep down in their bones: while shipping websites is sometimes easy, the maintenance part is not.

Somewhere between launch day confetti and six months later, your build ends up requiring seventeen plugins and performing an ethically gray ritual, just to keep things running. Your site gets fragile. Bloated. Stale. The deploy pipeline starts looking like a kitchen that a group of kindergartners have been “cooking” in for the last week. Your utensil drawer has been replaced with a vague sense of dread, and your dry ingredients have been spilled all over the floor.

So we sprung into action to do what we do best: we marched into the test kitchen and started rebuilding the recipe!

The Problem: Modern Web Stacks Feel Like Cooking During an Earthquake

You’ve got everything you need: design system, components, content, a plan (and maybe a playlist to jam while you’re building).

But somehow shipping still runs up against the brick wall of multiple frameworks, a database + CMS layer, and a deployment pipeline held together with thoughts, prayers, and one dependency that updates every Tuesday just to remind you who’s boss.

Simple edits turn into unwelcome meetings with Milton (we like him just fine). Maintenance turns into archaeology. And somewhere in your CI config, a ‘possum is chewing through a cable while maintaining unblinking eye contact.

The Solution: Build Awesome

Build Awesome is static by default. That means fast sites that don’t crumble under their own stack, with:

Durable HTML output: boring (compliment) pages that keep working for years
No database required: fewer moving parts, fewer “why is prod on fire” moments
Anywhere hosting: deploy where you want, not where a platform insists
Clearer structure for maintenance + collaboration: easier edits after launch, even with team churn
Optional Pro workflow tools: safer updates, previews, and teamwork without lock-in

Aaand, no Awesomeverse project is complete without a fun video. Well, you guessed it, a bunch of the video cast and crew are back at it (including a ‘possum mascot!) so quit readin’ and start watchin’!

Check out the Kickstarter!

Staying True to Open Source: An Honest Reflection

2026-06-25T19:28:58Z

A few months ago, we started to notice something uncomfortable in the Web Awesome- Awesomeverse. Not outright anger from the community, but maybe something more like skepticism.

This uncomfortable feeling showed up in Discord threads and support emails. We were getting the message that folks were testing the waters, but that maybe they weren’t sure they trusted us just yet. And when we took an honest look at what was happening, the answer started coming into view: during the Web Awesome Kickstarter, we were in a rush to ship, and we’d started acting more like a product company instead of an open source project. We were sending mixed signals.

That’s not who we are.

How It Happened

During a Kickstarter, shipping on time matters. Backers were waiting, but there’s a cost to working fast, and in this situation the cost was that we’d lost clarity about what Web Awesome actually is, and about who it’s for.

We had prioritized account creation, which made the paywall feel more prominent than the free tier, but that wasn’t the result of sneaky intentions. Our real-time decisions were the result of a team figuring out how to be a sustainable business while also staying true to an open source project. Those two things are genuinely tricky to balance, and we found the line by crossing it.

What’s Actually True

As an open source web components library, Web Awesome is likely the most serious platform-agnostic option in the web components space right now. We’re not trying to puff ourselves up by making that claim, it’s just the reality of the landscape.

Our goal has always been to lower the bar for building accessible, usable, well-made things on the web. A lot of the built-in challenges like accessibility, component behavior, cross-framework compatibility, are difficulties that individual developers and small teams shouldn’t have to solve from the ground up every single time. Web Awesome exists to solve those issues once, for everybody.

So, why does this mean? Well, the free tier isn’t a funnel. The free tier is the whole point.

Web Awesome Pro exists because building and maintaining a serious open source project requires a team to maintain it, and teams need to eat. To put it in perspective, the conversion rate on a project like this is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of between 1–4%. That means the majority of people who use Web Awesome will never pay for it. And that’s totally cool, because that’s a model we believe in and always have. The goal is to give useful tools to as many people as possible while also providing options to those who want to take things up a notch.

The Course Correction

We’ve already changed the homepage to lower the bar to entry. And we have a public CDN that’s available to everyone. Now, signing up for Web Awesome is optional, but not required, and we’ve got more coming. We’re not building more features as a Public Relations gimmick, but as a reflection of what was always true, but got obscured for a minute.

We didn’t need to convince ourselves to care about open source. We needed to be reminded again not to let the pressure to ship fast pull us away from it. And when Cory raised the concern internally, the response from leadership was immediate: yeah, go fix it.

Being able to raise those kinds of concerns, and pump the brakes, is not a given at most companies. And that feels worth highlighting, too.

What Comes Next

Trust isn’t rebuilt through announcements, but by showing up consistently over time, shipping good work, to ensure the free tier is genuinely useful, and then being honest when something goes sideways.

That’s our plan. Not because it’s good marketing, but because it has been, and always will be, the only version of this worth doing.

Why We’re Staying Curious and Reasonable About AI

2026-06-11T13:25:00Z

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

There’s a version of this post where we could tell you AI changed everything overnight and that we’re never looking back. The thing is, that’s not what happened.

What actually happened is slower, and we think, more interesting. At the moment, we think AI use is more about intent, and what it means to build something for other people, not just crank out high volumes of slop.

We Didn’t Come In As True Believers

When AI tools started becoming more common for devs and designers, it’s not like we were in a huge rush to embrace them. But we were curious, aaaand also a bit skeptical. Travis put it plainly: “It’s not necessarily the world I would have envisioned or I would have picked.”

That’s an honest thing to say out loud, and a sentiment worth considering. This is a little Captian Obvious to say, but there’s a real disruption happening. The things a lot of us have gotten really good at (like the craft of writing a function, solving a gnarly UI problem, debugging until 1am because the thing just wouldn’t work) are changing. Some of them are getting eaten up by AI.

But rather than become doomsday prophets about how we’re all getting rolled over by the AI Overlords, we’ve decided to stay “curious and reasonable”. It turns out, curious and reasonable is one of the three core behaviors we try to practice at Font Awesome, and that means we don’t jump to a dogmatic conclusion before we’ve actually spent time with something. But it also means we reserve the right to change our opinions when the evidence changes. So, we approach AI tools with some healthy skepticism, but if the tools get better, and it opens more opportunities, we’ll acknowledge that as we continue learning.

So we ran an experiment. We called it Build Week.

Build Week: What We Actually Found Out

At our most recent all company Snuggle, everyone on the team came in and spent a week building — and not necessarily on Font Awesome projects. Nobody was under any particular pressure, the goals was just to build using AI to see what happened.

The results surprised us. Not because the AI did everything for us, but because of where it helped most. Most folks gravitated toward their areas of deepest expertise and used the tools to reach further around the edges. Security folks got more thorough security. Designers got more precise design. Developers finally got to clearing out the decade-long backlog items that never made it into a sprint.

Dave Gandy, who spent the week building Color Awesome (a tool he’d wanted to make for years) put it this way: AI helps you be more of who you are, not less.

That was the unexpected part. With AI, there’s often an assumption that it would flatten everyone into generic output. What we found was almost the opposite. When you know what you want and you understand the domain, the tools can amplify your judgment. The stuff that fell out of the week felt specific, personal, and fully ours. Dave’s color palette visualizer ended up looking like stained glass — because he’d just been to the Sagrada Família and that’s where his head was. The tool wasn’t a replacement for true taste. It gave the taste somewhere to go, but faster.

The Question That Actually Matters

Here’s a question we kept coming back to: What are we doing this for, and why? That may sound simple, but it isn’t.

For example, if the goal is to learn to code, leaning on AI to write all your code is a bad idea. You’ll ship stuff you don’t understand and can’t maintain. Kind of like how a student might use AI to write every paper isn’t learning to write, rather, they’re just checking an assignment off a list.

But if the goal is to build great software for real people, that’s different. The end user doesn’t care how long it took you to write the function, they care about whether it works, whether it’s fast, and whether it gets out of their way. And if these tools let a small team ship five or ten times more of the right things for the people they’re serving, that’s not cheating, it’s focus.

That framing shifted something for us, because the best engineers aren’t the ones who write code in the way that’s most fun for them. They write code in the way that’s most useful for someone else. AI, used right, is just another way to stay focused on that goal.

More Power, Harder Choices

Here’s the part nobody warns you about: when you can build almost anything, the hardest skill becomes knowing what not to build.

Travis framed it as a quality problem. When you can produce so much more output, the bottleneck of workflows shifts to review, to make sure what ships are actually good, reliable, and useful. The speed is real, but so is the responsibility to stay user-centric, and useful.

Dave made the same point from a product angle: more features aren’t better. Anyone who’s ever moved to a new house knows what he means. Every box you carry down the stairs is a feature you have to maintain forever. It’s the right stuff that you’re looking for, not more stuff.

So we’re thinking harder about discernment. Who do we talk to? What do our customers actually need? What does simplicity look like when you suddenly have the ability to add … anything? The ability to say no confidently, quickly, and on purpose has never been more important.

The Concerns We Take Seriously

We’re also not going to skip past the hard parts of the conversation. AI raises real questions. Energy and compute costs are real. The ethics of training data — what was scraped, from whom, and under what permissions — are real. The effect on jobs, on what it means to be a developer or designer, on the skills people spend years building, that’s real, too.

Travis put it honestly: you can’t put the genie back in the bottle on some of this. Maybe we get better moving forward, but we also need better governance. And we definitely need to keep having the hard conversations rather than pretending they’re settled.

Dave’s take is that this is the same story technology has always told. You can do remarkable things with powerful tools, and you can do terrible things with them too. The question has always been intent and character, not capability alone. All capability and no character is, as Dave put it, just a supervillain. Zod doesn’t have a product strategy, he just has power and no guardrails.

Character has to come first. That’s true for people, and it has to be true for how we adopt these tools at Font Awesome.

Why We’re Still Here, Still Curious

Here’s what we keep coming back to: the people who get hit hardest by major technological transitions are almost always the ones who refuse to engage with them at all.

That’s not a reason to abandon your judgment. It’s a reason to use it. Stay curious, and ask the hard questions. Don’t just accept the hype, but don’t perform skepticism as a substitute for actually figuring out the right thing to do.

We ran Build Week because we wanted to start poking around and start formulating opinions, and find a way forward. What we found was that these tools, used with clear intent and real taste, actually help people become more of who they are. That was the surprise, and that’s why we’re staying curious.

Obviously, this conversation will look different a year from now. And it will probably be different a month from now. But the framework we’re working from, to stay curious and reasonable, humble and helpful, adventurous and dependable — that’s all the same.

Now, go forth and go make something awesome!

This post is based on conversations from Episodes 1 and 2 of Podcast Awesome with Dave Gandy and Travis Chase. Listen wherever you get podcasts or at podcastawesome.com.

WA 3.8: Date Picker, Accordion, and SSR

2026-06-08T22:25:52Z

📅 It’s about time

We know you’ve been waiting for a date, and we’re not about to let you get stood up. Four new components are here to sweep you off your feet:

<wa-date-picker>

Grab <wa-date-picker> to display an inline calendar for selecting a date or date range. Show one or multiple months at a time, disable specific dates or days of the week, customize how days of the week are labeled…the possibilities are (nearly) endless.

<wa-date-input>

Snag <wa-date-input> for a form-associated date input, letting users edit discrete segments for day, month, and year with the keyboard or select from a date picker popup. The date picker popup supports that same customization options as <wa-date-picker>.

<wa-date-input> localizes the input format based on the lang=”” attribute set on the component or any parent element so that day, month, and year appear in a familiar order.

<wa-known-date>

Sometimes, having too many dates to choose from is a burden. Reach for <wa-known-date> for dates that your users know by heart, like birthdays or expirations. <wa-known-date> shows three separate fields for day, month, and year in a neatly packaged fieldset that submits a single ISO date value. No need to page through months– or years-worth of dates to find the right one.

Like <wa-date-input>, <wa-known-date> renders each field in the order most familiar to the current locale.

<wa-time-input>

For something of a smaller scale, grab <wa-time-input> for a form-associated time input. Users can edit discrete segments for hour, minute, and optional second with an additional AM/PM option depending on the locale. Users can type to enter their values or select from a popup.

🪗 Bellowing for <wa-accordion>

Who doesn’t love a little polka? …wait, not that accordion.

Play with <wa-accordion> (and <wa-accordion-item>) to display synchronized, expandable sections of content. Choose whether only one or multiple accordion items can be expanded at once, and enjoy super smooth animations to transition from one state to another.

☝️ Remember: All new components are released in experimental status until they’re properly battle-tested on real websites. If you run into something that’s not working for you, let us know.

Enough new components for one day…

⚙️ Giving back(end) with SSR

Web Awesome now supports server-side-rendering.

Server-side rendering, or SSR, first renders your webpage on the server before sending the fully formed HTML to a user’s browser. This helps optimize your content for search engines and improves initial loads times — there’s no waiting for JavaScript to load before your content appears.

For Web Awesome components, Declarative Shadow DOM allows us to load the HTML markup of a component, then hydrate the component once JavaScript kicks in to add the full-featured interactivity. Doing so renders an approximation of the component right away and helps reduce layout shifting.

You can try using SSR with Web Awesome in your own project, or toggle the “Try SSR” switch on our docs to see it in action.

As a brand-new, experimental feature, there are existing bugs and limitations to be mindful of. If you encounter an issue that hasn’t already been reported, please report the issue on GitHub so we can continue refining the SSR experience.

🚚 We know it’s already a lot…

…but we have plenty of other goodies and improvements in WA 3.8, including:

An image=”” attribute for <wa-qr-code> to add logos to the center of a QR code
Text transform utilities: wa-text-uppercase, wa-text-lowercase, and wa-text-capitalize
Text alignment utilities: wa-text-start, wa-text-center, wa-text-end, and wa-text-justify
A wa-prose utility for applying typographic rhythm to long-form content
Updates to Native Styles, including a style reset for <menu>, new styles for <figcaption>, and improvements to a number of text elements
An overhaul of our theming documentation with new guidance on detecting color scheme preferences and using built-in classes to make existing themes your own

Pop over to our changelog for the laundry list of everything fresh in WA 3.8.

Holy GDPR Compliance, Batman!

2026-05-14T16:06:23Z

You’ve probably heard about GDPR or at least seen its effects (all those popups asking you to accept cookie settings, for example). We’ve got some GDPR compliance of our own and in this post we’ll be talking about the nature of privacy, export, and explicit consent.

TL;DR

You tried to login to Font Awesome and got a popup about accepting our terms of service and privacy policy. Those terms and policies have not changed in over a year, we simply need explicit consent from our users, specifically those living in Europe so we comply with GDPR.

Since we are a small company, we can’t easily maintain data centers in the EU. What little data we collect about you needs to be exported to the US. We aren’t supposed to do that unless you agree to the export.

A more in-depth discussion of privacy

What is privacy? This is a complex topic. WAAAAY back when I first got into security, privacy was mostly about ensuring information about a person was kept secret. Think about medical and financial records. For a long time, the goal was to make sure no one else could get that information so bad actors couldn’t steal your identity or get access to things reserved for you (like your bank account or health insurance).

Today, things are a little different. Because much of the Internet is free to use, someone had to foot the bill for jigawatts of power used to run the servers that shape our daily lives. The solution was advertising. Advertising is more effective and lucrative when the advertiser knows a lot about their target audience. To that end, companies that rely heavily on advertising have started collecting TONS of data about individual users.

Unfortunately, in their rush towards profitability, a lot of companies didn’t really consider how all this newly available information might harm users. So, after years of abuse, the EU finally decided to stand up for the rights of the people (what else should a government do, right?). They made privacy about the right of the person to control how specific information about them is collected, used, and maintained.

Font Awesome and privacy

From the beginning, our goal has been to follow the Golden Rule; treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. That is why, from Font Awesome’s beginning, we’ve done things a little differently. Unlike 10^100 or rivers in Brazil (you know who you are) our free product is genuinely free and open source. Just use it! We want you to! It’s awesome!

In order to keep making awesome stuff, we have a Pro version of our product. That is our main source of revenue. We don’t track how you use our product and create profiles about you that we sell to advertising agencies, we just make a product we think is worth the price you pay for it.

That data gets used primarily to make sure things are running smoothly and so that we can communicate with you about any problems, updates, or sweet deals. Full disclosure, we do have some small ads on our free site, but those ads aren’t targeted, i.e., they don’t know anything about you specifically (which is why we make VERY little money from them directly).

To get a Font Awesome account, all you need to give us is an email address so we can keep in touch if necessary. You can choose to tell us a little bit more about yourself, but all we do with that is personalize your emails (and try to figure out how long people have heard about us and their favorite icons). Our commitment to you is always to keep your data safe and never use it beyond the bounds of Font Awesome.

Font Awesome is a small company. At the moment, we don’t have a solution that allows us to keep EU data entirely within the geographical bounds of the EU member states. To that end, we have to export user data. The good news is, because we collect almost nothing anyway, the cybersecurity risk to our users is very low in general. However, to be considerate citizens of the Internet/world and comply with the law we need you to explicitly agree to let us export that data.

To achieve the above, we comply with EU-U.S. DPF. If you’d like to learn more about that, you can read the following here, and here.

We plan to keep your data safe to the best of our ability. However, there is a chance that some US law enforcement agency can compel us to provide information about EU citizens. If the risk of having your email address and the other information you provided us (up to and including first name, last name, year you learned about Font Awesome, and favorite icon) potentially read by US authorities is too great for you, we understand. We hope to not require information export in the future; until that day arrives, we’ll do the best that we can otherwise. That is why we need you to explicitly consent to having your data exported to the US.

Wa 3.7: Wa-Video, Custom Wa-Copy-Button Triggers, and More

2026-05-12T22:53:13Z

Want to make sure you keep getting updates with every release? Head over to our changelog and sign up for email updates.

📽️ <wa-video> Killed the Radio Star

You can rewind if you’ve gone too far. WA 3.7 adds two new, experimental components for all of your moving picture needs: <wa-video> and <wa-video-playlist>

with-more-awesome-video.gif

Use <wa-video> to embed video content on your site with a player that matches your own Web Awesome theme and adapts to light and dark mode. Choose your video controls, customize the play and pause icons, and add captions, subtitles, and poster images if you have ’em.

Have more than one video to show? (Those radio stars will be heartbroken.) Grab <wa-video-playlist> for playing multiple videos back-to-back, like a playlist of music videos or lessons in a course.

📋 Trigger warning
<wa-copy-button> now supports custom triggers so you can use a <wa-button>, a run-of-the-mill <button>, or any clickable element your heart desires to copy a value.

Plus, <wa-copy-button> has graduated from experimental to stable. 🎓 (A bit behind its classmates, but hey, we don’t judge.) With stable components, don’t expect any breaking changes until we release a major version upgrade of the entire library.

👇 Click Bait

We’ve added a pair of new tokens to support more dynamic button interactions: –wa-button-transform-hover and –wa-button-transform-active. The Default theme now has a subtle shrink effect on press, which you can easily customize by assigning your own transform function to these new tokens.

Additionally, we’ve updated the –wa-color-mix-hover and –wa-color-mix-active values for all themes with relative color functions to avoid any dingy gray tints. (Ew.)

🎬 That’s a Wrap

As always, there are plenty of other fixes and improvements in this release, including some new text wrap CSS utilities — wa-text-wrap-nowrap, wa-text-wrap-balance, and wa-text-wrap-pretty. Check out the latest mix on our changelog.

New Sponsorship Tiers for the Build Awesome Kickstarter

2026-05-08T18:51:00Z

A ’possum always pays their debts.

Folks following along to the Build Awesome Pro Kickstarter might already know: we’re creating a new kind of website builder (and full-stack Editable SDK) for your web projects, starting at just $29 for an entire year! In-browser editing and live previews included!

Back the Kickstarter (starting at $29)

But there’s one small piece that may have snuck under the radar: we’ve also added sponsorship tiers (priced yearly) to unlock unique and exclusive new benefits.

Benefit	Bronze Tier	Silver Tier	Gold Tier
[Font Awesome, Web Awesome, Build Awesome] Pro Bundles Included	×5	×10	×20
Your brand icon added to the Font Awesome icon library. This is the only way to commission a brand icon¹!	-	Silver	Gold
Your logo on the Build Awesome website (coming to build.awesome.me via 11ty.dev), ordered by tier level	Bronze	Silver	Gold
Your logo on the Awesomeverse Sponsor page, available on Build Awesome, Font Awesome and Web Awesome	-	-	Gold
Dedicated premium private Discord access with the Build Awesome team	-	Silver	Gold
Add your website to our exhibition/showcase	-	Silver	Gold
Premium Actual Human™ Support (fast-pass questions and bug fixes; now with even more Human)	-	-	Gold

Help us Build something Awesome.

Don’t see a tier that fits your needs? Contact us!

Font Awesome has previously offered brand icon commissions but this service is no longer available except through this sponsorship tier.

WA 3.6: Graduation Day for Experimental Components

2026-04-30T22:50:08Z

🎓 Con_grad_ulations!

They’ve been battle-tested. They’ve been tuned-up. And, now, they’re now ready to take the stage in your projects. Here are our WA 3.6 component graduates who we’ve upgraded from experimental to stable:

<wa-chart> (including all <wa-*-chart> components)
<wa-combobox>
<wa-file-input>
<wa-number-input>
<wa-sparkline>
<wa-toast>

Components move out of experimental status when they’ve had enough time out in the wild that we feel confident in their APIs. With stable components, we won’t implement any breaking changes until we release a major version upgrade of the library as a whole.

👕 size=”” Matters

We’ve added two new sizes to all components that support the size attribute to round out the scale: xs and xl. If you’ve ever needed a barely-there <wa-button> or an in-your-face <wa-callout>, you’re in luck

The full gamut of sizes, demonstrated on

Along with this change, we’ve renamed the existing small, medium, and large sizes to s, m, and l to better align with how we name sizes in our design tokens and utility classes. (Bonus: Less to type!) While the long-form names have been deprecated, they’ll continue to work in every minor version release of WA 3.x.

✨ The Usual Extra Sparkle

As usual, there’s a slew of other improvements and fixes in WA 3.6, including a sweeping refactor of our component tests with better test coverage. Read our changelog for all of the glitz and glam.

Game on for the Build Awesome Kickstarter

2026-04-23T22:47:00Z

A few weeks ago, we pressed pause on the Build Awesome Kickstarter because our emails weren't reaching inboxes. Kickstarter campaigns live on momentum, and ours wasn’t living up to its potential. In the mean time, we've been hard at work cleaning up our email infrastructure and watching deliverability climb back where it should be.

The campaign goes live April 28

If you pledged to the paused campaign, first of all thank you. Unfortunately your pledge will not carry over (Kickstarter doesn't allow pledge transfers), but we’ll have a special reward for those early Kickstarter backers when the new page goes live. Keep an eye out for a special message through Kickstarter with a little treat when the campaign goes live .

How you can help

Hit Notify Me on the pre-launch page. The first 48 hours are pivotal in a Kickstarter and notifications help build that momentum.
Share the pre-launch with someone else. Word of mouth is one channel Gmail can't filter!

See you April 28th

We hit our funding goal in a day on the first attempt, with a lot of our audience never hearing about it. We're excited to see what happens this time.

See you at the relaunch!

Get notified on launch

Get the Most Out of Font Awesome Kits: A Deeper Dive Into Your Icon Toolbox

2026-04-09T16:53:47Z

With great power comes great responsibility.

Ever get that sinking feeling that your Font Awesome Kit might be working… but not working for you?

Yeah, you’re using a Kit for icons (duh), but chances are you’re not tapping into its full potential — and that could mean missed opportunities, wasted pageviews, and even surprise overages. No bueno. It might be time for a level up.

Remember the rush of uncovering a hidden level in your favorite classic game, like finding a secret warp pipe in Super Mario Bros.? Well, Font Awesome Kits have features you might not be tapping into yet that’ll help keep your projects on track.

Whether you’re a n00b looking to speed-run your first project or a seasoned dev ready to unlock every achievement, mastering Kits will have you wielding icons with the nimbleness of a pro gamer pulling off a perfect combo.

Sure, things look fine on the surface — but under the hood, mismanaged Kits can quietly slow your site, leak resources, or lead to unnecessary costs.

OK, so maybe unlocking Kit features isn’t the same rush as that perfect combo, but a fine-tuned Kit will definitely make managing your account a cinch. So, what tweaks can you make and why does it matter?

Pageviews are often overlooked, but mismanaging them can lead to overages, which could slow down your site or even cost you extra.
Domains are another feature that tends to get lost in the shuffle, but they’re key to making sure your pageviews go where they’re needed most.
Downloading your Kit is all about flexibility — whether you’re working offline or just want to keep a local copy of your icons, this feature puts the power in your hands.

But we’ll break each of these down a bit more …

What’s in a Kit? More than you might think

A Kit is your go-to briefcase for all things icons. It’s where you keep all the tools — icons, settings, and configurations — you’ll need for your projects. But here’s the kicker: Most people aren’t using their Kits to their fullest. And that’s where we come in.

Here are some key features you might not be taking advantage of.

Pageviews: Know where you stand

Whether you’re a free or Pro user — every Font Awesome plan has a pageview limit. We’re not too touchy about it if you go over your allotted amount, but knowing your pageview is a good idea so you stay within your range. A pageview is counted whenever your Kit is loaded onto a web page. We count pageviews per month, and they renew on the first of each month. Every Font Awesome subscription comes with a number of Kit pageviews counted across all Kits.

Don’t ignore this too long though, you could end up with a Kit that’s doing double duty on sites you don’t even control — racking up usage faster than a Konami Code lives cheat.

If you’re curious where your project stands, you can check your Kit pageviews usage in your Account. Over your amount? Not a huge deal, but it may be time for a plan upgrade.

Domains: Putting the power in your hands

Here’s a pro tip: You can control pageview usage by setting up domains. Without domains, your Kit is vulnerable — anyone with your Kit code could use it on their own site, draining your pageviews and potentially causing problems.

Locking down domains is your first line of defense. It ensures that only the domains you trust can access your Kit, keeping out those who shouldn’t have access. If you don’t set it up, your Kit is wide open, and anyone — from mordor.com to balrog.biz — can use it, which would be wretched indeed.

By guarding your Kit with domains, you’ll manage your pageviews better and keep your resources safe from unwanted access like a true steward of Gondor.

Downloading your Kit: Taking full control

Want to take your Kit on the road? Maybe you’re working on a self-hosted project or need those icons in your desktop app. Relying on cloud-only access can sometimes leave you stranded — like showing up to a LAN party without your rig.

Good news: downloading your Kit is super easy. Just open your Kit, hit the ‘Download’ tab, and you’re all set. You’ll get SVG and OTF files, ready to use in your favorite font manager. It’s like packing your briefcase with all the essentials before heading out the door.

So, to summarize:

Your Kit might be underperforming or overexposed.
That can lead to unexpected costs, bandwidth drain, or even performance hits.
Master a few simple features — pageviews, domains, and downloads — and your Kit will be optimized, secure, and ready to flex across any project.

Your Kit has the power. Now it’s up to you to use it wisely. Log in, and lock it down!

Want to learn more? Watch the screencast!

Wa 3.5: Public CDN and <wa-page> for Everyone

2026-04-03T22:48:29Z

We know the best way to make the web a better place is to make web-building tools transparent, accessible, and available to everyone. That’s why Web Awesome is and always will be open source.

We’re doubling down on that commitment today with two big changes.

All of Web Awesome is now available on our public CDN. Just copy, paste, and get building — no signup or email address required.

For Web Awesome account holders, you’ll also see a new CDN tab for each of your projects. Your CDN project code lists out all of the stylesheets you need to implement your project’s theme and features (like native styles and CSS utilities) in addition to the Web Awesome autoloader for components, plus additional guidance for what classes or attributes you might need on your page.

The new CDN tab has everything you need to make something awesome with the public CDN

(We have work ahead of us to compile themes for each project so that collection of stylesheets is just a single line. Stay tuned for those improvements.)

We’ve added similar instructions for npm and self-hosted methods, too. Now, it’s easier to implement your preferred version, features, FA kit, and custom theme, regardless of your installation method. Sweet, right?

So, while you don’t need an account to use Web Awesome, you can still grab one for tailored installation instructions or Pro features like working with teams, patterns, the theme builder, Figma design kit, and Pro components. And, speaking of Pro components…

<wa-page> for Everyone

<wa-page> no longer requires a Pro subscription. We’ve moved the popular component from Web Awesome Pro to Web Awesome core to bring painless layout scaffolding to everyone.

Yep, even you 🫵, dear reader. Cheers!

<wa-page>: slots for every common page section and responsiveness baked in, all for free

“But that’s not enough,” you say?

You want more!

We have a ton of extra goodies in WA 3.5, including about a million fixes and improvements (not really, but it is a lot), plus a brand-spanking-new <wa-markdown> component to transform your easy-breezy markdown syntax into plain ol’ HTML.

Head over to our changelog for all of the details.

Happy building, folks!