Page loading speed is an aspect that each online site must think about. Google, which is a well-known search engine, requires modifications related to the user experience that also impacts websites’ ranking. With this thought, the company designed and developed the latest metric: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

This parameter’s emphasis is to make sure that users who land at the online sites are fully contented with what they find. That includes not merely content but also performance as well as presentation.

If any online site takes so much time to open and present what it has to provide either products or services, then there are huge chances the visitor will close the web page. For Google, this only means that the experience of the user was not good.

But still, wondering what Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) actually means and how it can badly affect your UX and SEO (search engine optimization) performance as well as SEO services? Keep reading this blog post! You will learn and understand the LCP metric, how to measure it, how to improve LCP score of your online site, and other essential points related to it.

Keep on reading…

 

What Is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint is the simple metric, which permits you to calculate the loading time of the largest graphic or pictorial element of a website. Its actual objective is to give an excellent user experience and is also considered one of the most important parameters of Core Web Vitals.

In addition, Google describes that this metric considers only the content above the page’s fold, meaning the whole thing that appears without scrolling.

There is one more appropriate point, which is absolutely related to the kind of content considered. The metric just measures the loading time of what is appropriate to the user experience that is:

• Image Elements;
• Image Tags;
• Video Elements (the images or thumbnails are used);
• Background Images Loaded Via CSS;
• Text Elements (Paragraphs, Headings, Tables, Lists, etc)
• Any other block element with text

 

 

How To Measure It?

You can count the Largest Contentful Paint in two different methods –

• Straight on the website by using a technique which is known as “field”;
• Via performance simulations executed by algorithms, in this situation, the lab mode.

For each of these ways, diverse tools accelerate the work and make the measurement more precise. Beginning with the field technique, you can use:

• Chrome User Experience Report;
• PageSpeed Insights;
• Search Console (Core Web Vitals report).

As for the lab tools, the most suggested are:

• Chrome DevTools;
• Lighthouse;
• WebPageTest.

 

As Largest Contentful Paint is an amazing metric, which is designed and developed by Google, we can effortlessly discover it in all these tools. This also makes it possible to perform an LCP test when required and, largely, with nonstop monitoring of the results.

 

 

What Is A Good Score?

Since metric checking and analyzing is very important, it is also very essential to comprehend the least performance standards expected.

There’s a precise demand from Google’s algorithms related to the web page loading time, considering the key content. In this situation, we are speaking for up to 2.5 seconds, which is an excellent result.

The best method to check the LCP score is to depend on the illustrated meter developed by many online LCP checker sites.

Continuously supervising this metric is indispensable to keep load time less than 2.5 seconds. If an adverse variation is noticed, increasing this time, it is very essential to examine the causes as well as act.

A fault related to LCP is not trying to boost this rate. Nonstop efforts will facilitate you to accomplish the desired results.

 

Why Does It Matter For SEO?

When we talk about SEO services and the connection between them and Largest Contentful Paint, there is a major point to highlight: Google strictly thinks that this metric to be a pertinent slice of Core Web Vitals.

So, LCP is an essential parameter examined by the algorithms, and online sites must attain an excellent score in it.

Over the past several years, Google has progressively attentive in describing examination parameters to improve the experience of the user, all of them fit in Core Web Vitals.

As Largest Contentful Paint is completely related to the web page loading time, so it obviously influences how Google scrutinizes and ranks a website on the search results page.

User experience is a differentiator, as well as an important parameter for online sites to be found in cyberspace. That is why, it’s not sufficient to have original content, striking products, and classy design.

Quickness in web page loading not only is favorable for the user but also makes sure that Google will rank high the content well.

 

How To Improve LCP Score

Now that you perfectly know that Largest Contentful Paint is important, what can you do to better it by making content load quicker? Google offers a lot of recommendations, but the most powerful way is to properly optimize content for the device demanding it.

For instance, a website comprises approx. 800-900kb JPEG image that is intended for high-resolution desktops. But, on a mobile phone that would be optimized highly down to below 100-200kb, with no noticeable impact on image quality. LCP score can easily better by more than 60% — or numerous seconds — via this simple optimization.