Data report
The typefaces Nigerian websites actually use
Not a list of fonts we like. This is the primary typeface read off the rendered page of every site in the archive — 280 of them — using the browser's own computed styles.
Nobody owns the Nigerian web
The leader takes under a tenth of the archive and the curve flattens almost immediately — second place is 13 sites, third is 10. For a market often described as derivative, that is a more fragmented and more individual picture than the reputation suggests.
It also means there is no safe consensus choice to hide behind. If you are picking type for a Nigerian brand you are not fighting a default — which is a freedom, and it is why the sites in this archive that commissioned or licensed something distinctive stand out as far as they do.
The fallbacks are doing their job
Arial turns up somewhere in the font stack of 28 sites, but it is the primary face on only 6 — 2%. Worth stating plainly, because the opposite is widely assumed: these sites are setting real webfonts, and the system stack is sitting behind them as a fallback rather than standing in for a decision nobody made.
This is the kind of claim that is easy to get wrong. An earlier draft of this page said a quarter of Nigerian sites fall back to Arial, because the count had been taken from anywhere in the stack rather than the face actually rendering. The corrected figure is roughly a tenth of that.
Primary typeface, 280 sites
Every row links to the sites using it. Counts are of the primary face only — the one the most text on the page is actually set in.
What the top of the list has in common
Nearly everything above the halfway mark is a neo-grotesque available free on Google Fonts. That is an economics story rather than a taste story: licensing a commercial typeface in naira is a real budget line, and free faces with good weight ranges win by default.
Which makes the exceptions worth looking at. The sites that licensed something — or commissioned it — are disproportionately the ones this archive rates highest, and you can see why: a distinctive face does more for a brand than any amount of layout polish.
How this was measured
Every site is loaded in a real Chromium browser rather than parsed as source. Once the page has settled, the font-family actually resolved by the browser is read off the largest run of body text — so what is counted is the face a visitor sees, not whatever the stylesheet lists first or a webfont that failed to load.
Sites that render no readable text, or that never finished loading, are excluded, which is why the sample is 280 rather than all 282. Figures are recomputed on every build, so they move as sites are captured and recaptured.