What is LCP- Largest Contentful Paint?
The largest contentful paint refers to the ampere that calculates the final time taken by a website to show the largest available content to the users indicating that the screen is ready for interaction. The metric considers only the relevant amount of time taken to load the content which is highly relevant to the user interaction like images, the tags, thumbnails of videos included, text elements (paragraphs, headings, etc.).
The monitoring of this metric is an essential standard that is undertaken to understand the performance of the website as a whole. According to the common base algorithms set by Google, 2.5 seconds is considered an adequate contentful paint. If the loading time exceeds 2.5 seconds but is less than 4 seconds, it indicates that the website needs improvement. A HIGH contentful paint exceeding the load time of 4 seconds indicates a negative variation and needs an immediate effect for improvement. Maintaining a decent LCP is crucial but not something that can’t be taken care of. Read ahead to find how to improve the largest contentful paint.
Reason For A High LCP
The main reason impacting a high contentful paint score may be the large elements of images loaded on the page. Due to high pixels and optimization, the loading time exceeds. The size of the optimization modal influences the specific dimensions and leads to overloading that generates a high LCP. Another reason for a poor LCP may be the slow server response time. The more time the server takes to render the script packages, the higher the loading time gets.
How Can The LCP Be Improved?
A high LCP affects the optimization and credibility of a webpage. It needs immediate attention and can be subdued with certain improvements. Here are a few tips on how to preload the largest contentful paint image on a webpage.
- Image sizes play an important role in determining the LCP. If the images used in the webpage code are of the right sizing, the loading time tends to be faster. Using tools for the enhancement of image adequacy is highly recommendable to balance the situation.
- Using a content delivery network can fasten the loading time and leads to a low LCP. You might wonder how to improve the largest contentful paint using a CDN. Well, a CDN minimizes the hassle of fetching the script packages, leading to faster server response. The server need not locate the content packages from the main location as now it can access the nearest source available.
- Using JavaScript for preloading your images on a webpage can slow down the process. The best you can do to load the images and other necessary content faster is to leave this job to the browser itself.
- Rendering your content faster can reduce the loading time as it is. When the rendering of content is done by the browser, it initially parses the HTML markup to cross the external stylesheets, which takes more time to load the content. To prevent this from happening, any type of CSS available in the LCP should be discarded right away.
- Optimize and compress the content to be rendered on the webpage as much as you can. The time taken by the elements to load onto the webpage is higher if not accurately preloaded. Compression and optimization lead to better availability at a faster rate and helps in preloading the LCP.
The above information might help you to know how to preload the largest contentful paint image. A better LCP will attract a larger consumer engagement over the website. With a higher loading time, the viewer tends to lose interest in the webpage and tends to back off. An enhanced user experience is the key to a high engagement and leads to a longer viewing time. It is one of the core web vitals that monitoring LCP becomes necessary to focus on-page optimization.
