Understanding them helps ensure that your website can deliver the best user experience. These consist of multiple metrics that represent how users interact with your website, one of which is the largest contentful paint (LCP).
What is the Largest Contentful Paint?
The largest content paint (LCP) represents the loading time of a website. It focuses on measuring how quickly the web page renders its largest elements, including images and blocks of text. A good LCP score can indicate a better user experience and lower bounce rates.
In this article, we’ll delve into the largest contentful paint by looking at how to measure it and some useful methods to improve it.
How to measure the Largest Contentful Paint
Measuring metrics Core Web Vitals, from first input delay (FID) to largest contentful paint (LCP), requires certain tools and software. The field data are obtained from real users and their experiences, while the laboratory data collect information from a simulated environment. Some tools also combine both types of data to provide a more detailed report to help you optimize your website.
One of the most popular tools for measuring LCP is from Google. It is a free tool that helps users analyze and diagnose website performance by presenting relevant audits and opportunities for improvement.
Using PageSpeed Insights is relatively easy. This is what you have to do to handle this tool:
- Type or paste the site’s URL into the search bar at the top of the page and click the button Analyze. Please note that completing the performance analysis may take a few minutes.
- Once the analysis is complete, review the section Diagnose performance issues for useful metrics and recommendations to improve performance. A score represents the overall result.
- You can find more metrics, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. click on expand view to read brief explanations of each metric.
- PageSpeed Insights also gives you multiple recommendations and diagnostics to improve site performance. It is also possible to filter them based on the relevant Core Web Vitals.
Other tools you can consider are and.
What is a good score for Largest Contentful Paint?
The largest contentful paint score is measured in seconds. As a general rule of thumb, a web page should be able to render its largest elements in less than 2.5 seconds.
A web page with an LCP score of 1.2 seconds or less means that it is good enough and no further action is needed. A score between 1.2 and 2.5 seconds is still acceptable. However, you may want to adjust some elements to improve it.
An LCP score greater than 2.5 seconds means your site is performing poorly, which can negatively affect the user experience and ultimately hinder your site’s growth.
What elements does the Largest Contentful Paint measure?
Each metric measures different elements of the website. For example, the first contentful paint (FCP) measures the time required for a web page to display the first content. In this case, the content includes images, graphics, and text elements.
Meanwhile, the LCP only measures how quickly a page can load the largest element within the viewport, which is the area of the viewport that displays the content. This is because the time it takes to display the largest element is an important indicator of page load speed.
Items that activate the LCP inputs include:
- Image elements (including those inside an SVG element)
- video elements
- Elements with a background image loaded using the
- Text nodes within block level elements
What is considered the largest element depends on the type. For image elements, the reported size is their visible size or their intrinsic size, whichever is smaller. For text elements, LCP only considers the size of their text nodes.
Also, the largest contentful paint will not consider any part of an element to extend or clip outside the viewport. This means that the size calculation does not include any margins, padding or borders.
How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint: 11 Effective Methods
Since the largest contentful paint is an important indicator of a site’s content, a poor LCP score can lead to a poor user experience. There are several common causes of poor website performance, including:
- Slow server response and resource load times
- Client-side rendering
- Resources that block rendering
Fortunately, there are several ways to solve these problems. Let’s look at 11 effective methods to improve the highest score of the largest contentful paint your site
1. Use a CDN
Difficulty level: medium
Impact: low/medium/high
A It is a great tool to improve the traffic management of your site. A CDN uses additional servers to help when the origin server needs to handle high traffic. Larger sites typically use this technology to handle many visitors on a regular basis.
For this reason, a CDN can help improve LCP by balancing the load on the network, since requests from visitors do not have to queue on the same server. This can lead to faster LCP scoring and potentially improve the user experience.
A CDN can also be enhanced with additional software, such as an Image CDN that optimizes and transforms image sizes in real time. This can further improve how quickly a media-rich website renders its content.
The process of setting up a CDN varies depending on your hosting provider. It is usually relatively straightforward. If you use , it is possible to enable a CDN directly from .
One of the most popular CDN solutions is , which offers more than 120 centers around the world. This service provides a free plan and has an easy setup process, especially if you are .
You can consider other CDN solutions, such as ,, and .
2. Ensuring the correct size of the image
Difficulty level: easy
Efficiency: low mid High
As mentioned above, some images can make a rich painting element depending on their sizes. Therefore, making sure your web pages are optimized for image size is important to maintaining a good LCP score.
The key here is to understand the correct image size based on the user’s device. To ensure a good LCP score, web pages must use responsive images.
For example, if the desktop version of your site uses large-size images, the mobile version should use medium-size images.
It is also important to know the default image sizes of your web platform. For example, there are four default image sizes in WordPress, which are:
- Miniature: precisely 150 square pixels
- Median: up to 300 square pixels.
- Great: maximum 1024 square pixels.
- Full size: refers to the size of the original image.
Please note that images report their smallest item size. This means that a compressed image will report its visible size, while an enlarged image will report its original size.
3. Optimize images
Difficulty level: easy
Efficiency: low mid High
In addition to ensuring the correct size, there are other ways to optimize the images on your site to improve load time.
If you are, the method is relatively simple, since you will only have to choose the appropriate file format or use a plugin.
Some of the most popular tools for optimizing images for websites are , , and . plugins like ,, and are also great options for WordPress users.
Optimizing images is not only useful for improving the PCL score. It allows you to save storage space and potentially improve the performance of the . If you’re a WordPress user, check out more ways to .
recommended reading
Images are not the only element that you should optimize to improve the performance of your WordPress site. Read to find out more.
4. Improve server response time
Difficulty level: medium
Efficiency: low mid High
Your page load time is closely related to web server response times. The back and forth process between the user’s browser request and the server’s request is one of the main factors affecting loading speed. This process is also known as round trip time (RTT).
There are several ways to improve server response time, including:
- Implement server-side caching: Website owners can take advantage of browser and server-side caching. The server-side caching feature is usually available in your hosting setup.
- Update server specs: the hardware specifications of a server significantly affect its performance. Therefore, consider upgrading to a server with better CPU capabilities and larger storage capacity.
- Optimize application codes: Optimizing codes used in functions such as querying a database can help improve an LCP’s score. For example, removing non-critical CSS can help speed up initial rendering. Don’t hesitate to ask web developers for help, as this step can be very technical.
In the case of WordPress websites, plugins like these can help optimize the database by reducing overhead and scheduling automatic cleanups.
5. Use a reliable web host
Difficulty level: easy
Efficiency: high
The quality of the is an important factor that affects the general performance of the web. A good web host is usually set up to improve the user experience and comes with various features to make web management easier.
Therefore, matching your site’s specifications can improve the perceived loading speed. has a wide range of hosting options to suit various needs and preferences.
For example, ours are specifically tuned to optimize the capabilities of the CMS and ensure faster loading time. The provider also uses an intuitive control panel that makes your web management experience less complicated.
6. Implement the cache
Difficulty level: easy/medium/hard
Efficiency: low mid High
Caching refers to saving the static assets of a page in a…
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