Icon Import Patterns That Kill Frontend Performance

An audit of 12 open-source frontend repos found 9 had performance issues from how SVGs were imported, not from using icon fonts. Common mistakes included loading a single sprite with 300 icons on every page, base64-encoding SVGs in JS bundles, and failing to tree-shake icon imports. Proper per-icon named imports, raw inline SVG for critical icons, and currentColor for theming avoid these pitfalls.