Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Google measures the speed of your Web site through the metric: Largest Contentful Paint. Along with First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), these are the three Core Web Vitals that measure a website's user experience. Nowadays, in addition to strong content, you need a good page experience to rank high in search engines. Google uses these Web Vitals to make the customer journey easier on websites. LCP is one of the most influential interruptions of the online customer journey being made. Most of the problems that occur with LCP are due to, according to Google:
- JavaScript and CSS block rendering
- Elements that load slowly (video and images)
- Server response time that is slow
- Rendering to the client customer
Getting your website up to speed
To determine exactly what is "fast enough," as Google indicates, is virtually impossible. The only way you can find out what speed suits your Web site is by looking at these factors:
- Should your website be fast enough that the user does not click away out of irritation or should the website work fast enough that the user is genuinely satisfied?
- What are the user's expectations and how much is the user in a hurry? Think from the user's perspective when setting up your website
A good score on Google's Largest Contentful Paint means that 75% of page visitors see the largest visible element within 2.5 seconds of loading. If this takes longer than 4 seconds, the page scores poorly. That means anything between 2.5 and 4 seconds needs improvement.
What is the LCP of a page?
It varies from page to page what the Largest Contentful paint is. The largest element on a page will often be a video, image or block of text. It is worth noting that the element that loads first is not directly the LCP. The LCP cannot be determined until the entire page is loaded. Once you figure out what the LCP of the page is, you can get to work improving this element. There are several tools you can use to find out the LCP, but the easiest one is Google PageSpeed. Once the page is run through PageSpeed, and the results are loaded, you can see the LCP of the page.
