How to Optimize LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
Overview
This parameter focus is to ensure that users who visit sites are satisfied with what they find which involves not only content but also performance.
This blog will describe the LCP metric, its components, and other essential points related to it.
What is the Largest Contentful Paint?
The Largest Contentful Paint metric measures how quickly the main content of a web page loads. To provide a good user experience sites should have an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less for at least 75% of page visits.
Google defines that this metric considers only the content above the page’s fold, meaning everything that appears without scrolling.
Another relevant point is that the metric only counts the loading time of what is relevant to the user experience, such as Images, image tags, video thumbnails, background images with CSS, and text elements, such as paragraph headings and lists.
Site Speed Performance Analysis Tools
- Google Pagespeed insights(Recommended)
- GTMetrix
- Google Lighthouse
- ChromeDevTools
What is a Good LCP Score?
According to Google’s algorithms, page loading time depends on the main content. This is a good result. Up to 2.5seconds are involved in this case.
- Good: 0-2.5 Seconds
- Needs improvement – LCP between 2.5-4.0 Seconds
- Poor – LCP greater than 4 Second
LCP value under 2.5 is recommended by Google’s performance tools.
How to Improve the Largest Contentful Paint
1. Optimize Your Images
Usually, a large image appears above the fold on most websites LCP is considered for those. In order to optimize these images for a better LCP, either it is a hero image, a banner, or a carousel.
- Deliver Proper Image Sizes(Responsive)
In almost all cases, Google indexes websites based on mobile users. Therefore, LCP should be optimized for mobile more than for desktop. Images must be scaled down according to the layout requirements.
- Right Image Format
There are two universally supported raster image formats: PNG and JPEG. In addition to these formats, modern browsers support the new format WebP.
- Automatically Compress Your Images
Images are not only converted to the correct format but also compressed to make them smaller. By doing so, it maintains an optimal balance between the output size and the quality of the images.
2. Improve Delivery Time by Caching Images
Image CDNs use a global Content Delivery Network(CDN) to deliver the images. Using a CDN ensures that images load from allocation closer to the user instead of your server, which could be halfway across the globe.
3. Preload Critical Resources
It is possible that the browser will not prioritize loading a visually important resource if it impacts LCP in some cases. A banner image above the fold in CSS could be specified as a background image.
You can include the rel=” preload” in the code:
Read this Blog and Find: How to Preload Critical Resources
4. Remove Render-Blocking Resources
- Do not load unnecessary bundles
- Inline critical CSS
5. Reduce Server Response Times
If a lot of computation page construction happens on the server. You should analyze the requests going to your servers and identify the server. maybe easy to understand according to the point.
- Analyze and optimize your servers
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Preconnect to third-party origins
- Serve content cache-first using a service worker
- Compress text files
Conclusion
This statistic tracks when significant content appears in the user’s viewport using a deceptively simple, but powerful technique. and the other point is the Largest Contentful Paint measures how long it takes for elements (text or images) to load. Ecommerce brands and news outlets are primarily reliant on LCP. Google’s Core Web Vitals, however, should be given more attention by every website.
Find out about speed optimization for Shopify –
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There is tons of article on LCP optimization but this article help me a lot. i want favor from you can you please share a practical video on it.
Thanks in Advance!!!