How To Optimize The Largest Contentful Paint & Rank Higher In Google
Are you curious about what Largest Contentful Paint signifies and how it may impact the effectiveness of your UX and SEO? Go on reading! You’ll learn what LCP is, how to test it, and how its grade is affected by certain situations. Additionally, you’ll discover how to improve WordPress performance and repair a poor LCP score on desktop and mobile (Largest Contentful Paint longer than 2.5 or 4 s). Simply put everything is in English! Definition of the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Why it Matters? The time it takes for the most significant element to become visible in the viewport is measured by the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), a Core Web Vital statistic. You won’t see practically anything on the page until the LCP loads. The LCP element is always above the fold, or at the top of the page, which is why. LCP is typically a text or graphic block. But it may also be a cartoon or a video. The LCP component can vary between desktop and mobile platforms. The biggest aspect, as you would have guessed, is the one that matters the most for perceived load speed and user experience. Consider this: you won’t have a nice user experience if the page’s main component takes a long time to load. While you waited for the website to load, you would see an almost blank page. Even leaving the website is possible! A few more seconds might go a long way when you’re browsing. Because of this, Google has added LCP to the Core Web Vitals metrics, which gauge how excellent your user experience is. LCP went live recently in June as a component of the Page Experience Signal, a new ranking factor. Because of this, Largest Contentful Paint is important for giving a fantastic user experience as well as for enhancing your SEO performance. LCP also contributes 25% of the overall PageSpeed Insights score. Your page speed grade will probably increase if you increase its performance. LCP is currently one of the most significant performance metrics, to put it briefly. The Ideal LCP Score LCP should be less than or equal to 2.5 seconds to achieve a high score. The page will receive a green score and pass the test if this is the case. The score “needs improvements” if LCP is between 2.5 and 4.0 s; you’ll receive an orange grade. Let’s say that the LCP is longer than 4 seconds. If the score is “poor,” you should make the necessary corrections as soon as you can. Now let’s look at How we may Locate the LCP Component. The LCP element can be located and measured in a variety of ways using both lab and field data. The most popular equipment for LCP testing is listed below. Lab Data tools: Lighthouse PageSpeed Insights Chrome DevTools WebPageTest GTmetrix Field Data tools: PageSpeed Insights (if available) Chrome User Experience Report (Field Data) Search Console – Core Web Vitals report (Field Data) In our article on PageSpeed Insights, we go into greater detail on the distinction between Lab and Field Data. Let’s discuss PageSpeed Insights and Search Console, two of the simplest and most useful tools. Using PageSpeed Insights to Assess and Identify LCP The simplest method for measuring and locating the LCP element is PageSpeed Insights. You will receive the LCP grade in the Lab Data and the Field Data after evaluating the URL’s website (if available). Additionally, you’ll receive PageSpeed advice to help you perform better. Locate the “Largest Contentful Paint element” section under Diagnostics. The LCP element for the page you’re evaluating will become clear to you. In order to make things clearer, let’s go over a few examples. The Mobile LCP Example We use the tool to test the page’s functionality, then we navigate to the Diagnostics section. The H1, or title of the blog post, is the LCP element. An outstanding user experience will be provided by the page as long as the primary headline loads quickly. Example of LCP from Desktop Once more, we visit the Diagnostics Area and search for the LCP component. Unsurprisingly, LCP differs from mobile LCP. The LCP for desktops is quite different: As a page-based tool, PageSpeed Insights, we advise you to do many tests for various pages. You should also use the Search Console for a comprehensive analysis. Finding LCP and Measuring It on Search Console The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console allows you to evaluate the performance of your entire website and identify any problems. Both performances will be accessible on PC and mobile: When you access the report, you can see how each criteria is being met by the pages on your site: good, requires improvement, and poor. Each Core Web Vital performance is grouped in the Search Console report according to status, issue kind, and URLs. You might, for instance, have some URLs that aren’t working properly for LCP. If so, you may see “LCP issue: longer than 2.5 s (mobile)” in the report. You can access the list of URLs that need to be corrected by clicking the entry that corresponds to that particular problem. While these URLs are merely examples, they can nonetheless help you understand what is happening. Finding the URL pattern and continuing with the patching and validation will be rather simple. What Affects LCP and Results in a Slow Score Delayed server response times, render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, and slow resource load times are three variables that have an impact on LCP for WordPress sites. Slow Response Times from Servers The server receives a request from the browser, but it takes too long for it to provide the desired material. It takes some time for things to be rendered on your screen since the content isn’t delivered to the browser quickly enough. The outcome is a poor load time. It has an impact on the LCP score. By lowering your Time to First Byte, utilising a CDN, and establishing third-party connections early,