Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) functions as a web performance tool that determines how quickly the main site content becomes visible to web visitors. When visitors view the biggest page element, it marks the rendering moment of LCP.
The Largest Contentful Paint stands as one of three Core Web Vitals for Google, which determines search rankings along with Cumulative Layout Shift and First Contentful Paint.
This article describes what is largest contentful paint is, as well as the methods to monitor it on your site and the procedure to optimise it.
What is largest contentful paint?
Websites display their fastest loading time to users through Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Now, what is largest contentful paint? LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures the speed at which the website displays its largest visual content and text blocks.
The LCP score quality directly relates to website usability and visitor retention levels. Both real user data stem from field observations, while lab data derive from simulated environments.
Website optimisation tools combine lab data with field data to generate superior, comprehensive reports. PageSpeed Insights by Google stands as one of the leading tools for determining LCP measurements.
Users can analyse and diagnose web performance through this free tool, which shows important audits and diagnostic improvement possibilities. The process of using PageSpeed Insights remains simple enough for anyone to perform.
Follow this procedure to operate the tool successfully:
- Place the URL of the website within the search box at the top of the page.
- The next step is to press the Analyse button.
- The performance analysis generally requires up to a few minutes to finalise.
- After the analysis finishes, users can view performance diagnosis results from the Diagnose performance issues section.
- The analysis provides several statistical indicators that include the largest contentful paint and the first contentful paint, along with cumulative layout shift scores.
- When you use PageSpeed Insights, it provides various performance improvement recommendations and diagnostic tools. Relevant Core Web Vitals enable users to apply specified filters to their results.
The improvement tools you should consider using are Lighthouse and Search Console.
What is a good LCP, and how do you measure it?
The results for Largest Contentful Paint appear as a time measurement in seconds. Web pages loaded with their largest contentful paint must complete the rendering process within 2.5 seconds maximum.
A web page with an LCP score of 1.2 seconds below indicates satisfactory performance, which eliminates the need for additional improvement. When LCP performance scores stay between 1.2 and 2.5 seconds, the result remains acceptable.
You should evaluate certain components for enhancement to ensure future improvements. Poor site performance becomes noticeable to users when LCP measurements exceed 2.5 seconds, which leads to negative UX and potential business growth restrictions.
Each metric measures different website elements. The web page requires determining the duration of the first contentful paint (FCP) until the first content becomes visible. The content measurement includes images together with charts and text elements.
The LCP restricts itself to measuring the viewport content loading speed of the biggest displayed component. The necessary time for showing the largest element stands as the primary determinant for page loading speed.
The LCP entry becomes triggered by the following components:
- The image elements within the SVG element.
- Video elements
- Visuals that have their background image loaded through the URL function
- Text nodes within block-level elements
The definition of the biggest element depends on the selected element category. The reported size for image elements comes from either the visible dimensions or the intrinsic size dimensions, but it will always pick the smallest one.
The text dimension of elements matters for LCP measurement, while their text nodes determine the reported size. The Largest Contentful Paint evaluation process ignores all elements that extend beyond or are clipped outside the viewport area. The size computation ignores all aspects of the margin, padding, and border during its evaluation.
Techniques for improving largest contentful paint:
Different methods exist to enhance your LCP, although certain improvements are more impactful than others.
Use a CDN
The implementation of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) proves beneficial for improving your LCP score because it lessens server response delays. A CDN consists of multiple servers that exist in multiple geographical locations.
Your site visitors obtain content from CDN servers positioned nearest to them when they visit your site. The server needs less time to respond to user requests, which means pages load faster and achieve a better LCP score.
CDNs handle traffic better than solitary servers, which protects against slowdowns that occur during periods of high demand.
Selecting a good web hosting provider
When you select an excellent web hosting service, you secure three key features of website performance: uptime stability, loading speed, and overall functioning capabilities.
Your site remains operational under all traffic conditions because this system ensures stability during periods of heavy use. During host selection, verify their server reliability and uptime scores as well as speed performance metrics.
You should perform testing on a particular hosting package to determine the exact Core Web Vitals scores that your website will obtain.
Correct Image Sizing
Image sizing represents a way to enhance your LCP score performance. The loading time of large images generates delays before the largest content element can finish loading. Your images should match the viewport size to prevent this issue.
Image dimensions must feature equal measurements to their software display parameters. The actual size of an image should match the display size, such as 500 x 500 pixels, when viewed at that resolution on the screen. Do not upload large images and then allow clients to resize them.
Images optimisation
The LCP scores benefit from optimised images because they lower resource loading times. This process reduces file sizes without sacrificing visual quality.
The optimisation of images follows three main optimisation approaches: lossless compression, lossy compression, and Webp Next-Gen formats.
Your images will become smaller through these compression methods, which results in reduced perceived resource costs and enhanced LCP evaluation results.
Implement Caching
Caching is an effective way to optimise your website’s LCP values. Webpage files will automatically be stored temporarily as cached versions to enable faster access to users.
Reduction in loading time becomes more significant with this implementation, which leads to better LCP scores. Website developers can use browser, page, object, and database caching when implementing their systems.
All these caching methods have specific operations, yet their core objective remains to mitigate server strain and boost site performance.
Compress file sizes like CSS and HTML files
Your LCP’s performance can be improved through processes that minimise both JavaScript and HTML files, as well as CSS code. Minification as a process reduces all non-essential data from your code base without damaging its operational functionality.
Code optimisation works by erasing all white spaces, line breaks, and comments from the codebase. A reduction in code file size lets your download and rendering processes finish more quickly. The total page load time accelerates, along with LCP improvements, as a result of your optimisation.
Compress Text Resources
Shortening text-related files stands as a method which boosts your LCP performance. You should reduce the size of your files to enhance their delivery speed across the internet. Gzip and Brotli act as two different tools that enable text file compression.
Technical compression of text documents boosts LCP and simultaneously decreases bandwidth usage and saves space on your systems.
Conclusion:
Here are the final thoughts on what is largest contentful paint. The optimisation of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) stands as a crucial factor in delivering quick, user-friendly websites, which leads to improved search engine performance.
Web developers who optimise image formats and sizes together with caching systems, reliable hosting services, content delivery networks, and file compression will greatly reduce loading times.
Websites that focus on Largest Contentful Paint Optimisation deliver better user retention while lowering abandonment rates and producing improved site performances, leading to business expansion.
