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Glossary

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint is the time from when a visitor starts loading a page to when the largest image, text block or video in view has rendered.

By NightshiftDirect Research. Published . Updated .

Which element it times

web.dev defines LCP as the render time of the largest image, text block or video visible in the viewport, counted from the moment the visitor first navigated to the page (web.dev: LCP). The viewport is whatever fits on the screen before any scrolling. On a phone, that is the top of your page.

So the element changes with the page and the screen. On a homepage that opens with a large photo, the photo is usually the biggest thing in view. On a page that opens with a headline and a paragraph, that block of text can be. Either way, the clock stops when the element has been drawn.

What counts as good

A good LCP is 2.5 seconds or less, judged at the 75th percentile of page loads, so a page passes only when at least three loads in four get there in time (web.dev: LCP).

The free scan reports a slower result as E1 and counts it as high severity once it passes 4 seconds. It uses real-visitor data when Google has enough of it for your site, and a single lab test, labeled as one, when it does not.

What usually slows it on a small business site

A common cause is the photo at the top. A hero image saved straight from a camera or a stock library is often far bigger than a phone screen needs, and LCP is not recorded until that image has been drawn. The usual cure is a smaller file: the image resized for the screens that show it, saved in a modern format and loaded early.

The other common cause comes before the page starts: the server. Nothing can appear until your host sends the first part of the page, so a slow server delays the largest element along with everything else. The scan measures that first wait on your homepage as a check of its own, E4, because the fix there is page caching or faster hosting.

How it fits with the other Core Web Vitals

LCP is the loading measure of the three Core Web Vitals, beside Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability. Google recommends good scores on all three and points site owners to the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console to see theirs (Google Search Central).

It is also the one you can judge by eye. Open your homepage on your phone over mobile data and watch how long the top of the page stays blank or half drawn. If it stays blank for long, start with the hero photo and the server.

What the free scan checks

Questions

Is a big hero photo bad for my page speed?

Usually only when it is not prepared for the web. The photo at the top is often the element LCP times, so a heavy file pushes that time back. Keep the photo if it shows your work well. Have it compressed and resized to the size it is displayed at, and set to load early.

Does my web host affect how fast my pages load?

Yes. The server has to answer before anything else can happen, so a slow host delays every page, its largest element included. If the scan flags E4, sort out caching or hosting before spending time on images.

Where this fits in our work

We handle this as part of Technical SEO: The crawl, index, speed and structured data problems that keep good pages from being found, fixed and shown with evidence.

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