Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

It is one of the most important parts of good SEO: fast load time. One way to achieve this is with a good Largest Contentful Paint. What is Largest Contentful Paint and what are the causes of a poor score in this area? I discuss the concept in detail here.

What is Largest Contentful Paint?

Largest Contentful Paint is a metric for determining the speed of a Web site. It measures how long it takes for the largest element on a page to fully load and be visible to the visitor.(1)

The importance of good Largest Contentful Paint

There are a number of ways Google measures the speed of a Web site. One way this is done is with the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). The LCP is one of the most important metrics for measuring speed, along with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Speed Index.

Strong content is no longer the only thing that gets you to the top of Google. Providing a good user experience is also important to rank as high as possible. A bad LCP may be caused by low server response time, display blocking by JavaScript and CSS, or slow loading of images and other elements.

The impact of Largest Contentful Paint on SEO

The Largest Contentful Paint certainly has an impact on the SEO of a website or page: when the first element of a website loads quickly, it is obviously good for the load time of a page. In addition, it is also positive for the user experience. Making the customer journey as pleasant as possible; one way to achieve that is with a good Largest Contentful Paint. And along with improving the CLS and Speed Index, improving Largest Contentful Paint is another way to rank higher in search results.

My advice

We recommend using a handy tool to understand Largest Contentful Paint and other important issues: Lighthouse. This is an open source tool from Google that provides interesting information about the current state of your website. Bringing in a programmer or developer is recommended, though: this allows for quick and good modifications in CSS and Javascript.

The most complete book on website speed

I’ve written so much about speeding up websites and everything involved that I like to divide it into different sections; general, tools, speed improvement points and tips. Feel free to see and consult all the links below to learn more about tools and tips for speeding up your website.

General

• What is the website speed
• Website speed: The division between marketing and development
• The influence of SEO on UX
• The influence of web design on SEO
• SPAs and SEO
• What are the Google Core Web Vitals?

Tools

• Autoptimize
• Pagespeed.Compare
• W3 Total Cache
• Tools Pingdom
• Google Pagespeed Insights
• GTMetrix

Verbter points for speed

• First Contentful Paint (FCP)
• Time To First Byte (TTFB).
• Time To Interactive (TTI).
• Image for Largest view with content (LCP) preloaded
• Enable text compression
• Reduce the CSS
• Total Blocking Time (TBT).
• Speed Index
• Reduce JavaScript
• Avoid an overly large DOM
• Delete unused CSS
• Remove unused JavaScript
• Deliver images in modern layouts
• Connect in advance to required origins
• Preventing obsolete JavaScript from being delivered to modern browsers
• Use an efficient cache policy for static items
• Remove duplicate modules from JavaScript
• Avoid multiple redirects
• Encode images efficiently
• Use lazy loading
• Load important requests in advance

General tips

• Tips for quickly loading a video
• Using Edge SEO for a faster website
• Installing a Content Delivery Network for SEO
• Optimizing images for SEO
• The influence of hosting on SEO