How to improve LCP
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a metric within Core Web Vitals, assessing the point at which the largest content element in the viewport becomes visible. While metrics like Time to First Byte (TTFB) and First Contentful Paint contribute to measuring page experience, they do not specifically indicate when the page becomes meaningful for the user. LCP emphasizes the moment when the most significant content is fully rendered, providing a more user-centric perspective on the loading experience. This metric aligns with the goal of creating web pages that swiftly deliver substantial and meaningful content to enhance overall user satisfaction.
What is LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) ?
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a crucial web performance metric that measures the time it takes for the largest and most significant content element on a web page to be fully rendered and visible to the user. This content element could be an image, video, or block-level text. LCP provides insights into the user’s perceived loading experience, emphasizing the time it takes to display meaningful content. Google uses LCP as one of the key metrics in its Core Web Vitals initiative, aiming to enhance the overall user experience by prioritizing fast and efficient loading of essential content.
How to improve your LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) score
1. Optimize Your Images
The primary content visible above the fold on many websites often includes a substantial image that contributes to the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Whether it’s a hero image, banner, or carousel, optimizing these images is essential to improve LCP performance.
Provide your images in more lightweight formats such as WebP or AVIF, automatically delivering the image in the lightest possible format in real-time. Formats like WebP, for example, are more than 30% lighter than their JPEG counterparts.
2. Preload critical resources
Preload essential resources to address scenarios where the browser might not prioritize loading visually significant elements affecting the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). In cases such as a banner image specified within a CSS file, the browser may not recognize the importance until both the CSS file and DOM tree are downloaded and parsed. Preloading helps ensure prioritized loading of critical resources, optimizing LCP by proactively fetching and rendering important elements.
3. Minimize Server Response
Times Extended server response times lead to a delay in rendering the page on the screen. Server-side processes like computations, database queries, and page construction significantly contribute to this duration. Analyzing incoming requests and pinpointing potential bottlenecks, such as slow database queries or page construction, is crucial. If improvements are not evident, consider augmenting your server capacity to efficiently manage the incoming request volume and enhance overall response times.
4. Remove render-blocking resources
Resources When the browser receives the HTML page from your server, it initiates parsing the DOM tree. If any external stylesheet or JS file is present in the DOM, the browser pauses to fetch them before continuing with the parsing of the remaining DOM tree.
These JS and CSS files, known as render-blocking resources, contribute to delaying the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time. Here are strategies to diminish the blocking time for JS and CSS files:
– Refrain from loading unnecessary bundles to avoid shipping extensive JS and CSS files upfront, especially if not required for a particular page. Delay loading them until necessary.
– Inline critical CSS, containing style definitions essential for the initial fold of your page, reducing dependency on external CSS and facilitating quicker page rendering.
– Minify and compress content by removing unnecessary whitespace in CSS and JS files before loading them in the browser. This reduction in file size accelerates loading, ultimately decreasing your LCP time.