What is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)? | Beginner-friendly

LCP – Largest Contentful Paint has been a buzzword soon after Google announces the page experience and ranking update.

Rankings on the SERP – Search Engine Result Pages matters to all websites, whichever business niche they deal with. As a result, the websites struggle to reach the top positions with all their might. That being said, they even hire SEO Services to give a makeover to their website.

In May, June, and July, and even until now, Google's Page Experience Update got the attention of the website world. You might also have come across several blog posts and articles about it. For example, "Core web vitals becoming the ranking factor." Core web vitals are the real-user-oriented and measurable speed metrics that Google uses to evaluate the page experience. 

For instance, the three vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID).

Let's take a step further and apprehend one of these components. Today we will discuss the first vital – LCP.

Ready?

Let's do this!

What is Largest Contentful Paint? 

As the name describes, Largest Contentful paint measures the loading time of the largest visual element of the site. In simple words, the time when the page's main content loads and becomes visible to the users so that they can start interacting with the site.

The ground reason behind introducing this metric is to make sure whoever visits the site (incoming traffic and users) should be satisfied. Therefore, it does not matter if it concerns the content, visuals, performance, and presentation.

Now, you might be curious as to what and whose loading time is measured in LCP?

What matters while measuring LCP? 

• Images
• Images tags
• Video poster images
• Background images
• iframes
• Text blocks (paragraphs, headings, and lists)
• Video elements.

However, keep in mind that it tracks only the largest image or the largest content chunk that comes in the users' windowpane. Any media files or content pieces other than the viewport aren't considered while calculating the time/ score.

LCP Score

As it is a metric, obviously, it will have good and bad ranges. For instance:

• A good LCP score is less than 2.5 seconds – The largest elements on the user screen will be loading faster, providing a good user experience.
• Furthermore, poor LCP is equal to and above the 4 seconds. Most probably, the page in use will be missing a lot of parts and will annoy the users.
• Thus, the visual and content loading time between 2.5 and 4 seconds is the average; that is, it needs improvement. Besides, Google advises the LCP time to be less than 2.5 seconds.

So stay focused to keep track of your website LCP score from time to time or hand over the responsibility to reliable SEO Services. 

How to measure Largest Contentful Paint? 

There are two ways to measure the score.

Field Tools (actual measurements of a site)	Lab tools (performance simulations via algorithms)
·         Chrome User Experience Report	·         Chrome DevTools
·         PageSpeed Insights	·         Lighthouse
·         Search Console (Core Web Vitals report)	·         WebPageTest

LCP and SEO

You already have guessed the connection between LCP and SEO.

LCP tells how fast a webpage can be used. User experience is all about the impression a webpage leaves on the user. Also, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) serves to increase web usability for visitors.

However, what if the website takes much time to load and causes the users to leave it? Granted, it will affect the SEO.

It means both are connected, and you should work on LCP to improve SEO. Finally, you will observe the perfect is the LCP score, and the fine will be the SEO results. 

Wrapping Up!

When it is decided that the websites with excellent user experience will get high rankings, it indicates that you need to optimize your website in whichever user experience aspect your website lacks.

We have already discussed the poor FID score and how to improve it in our previous post. And today, you have to come to know about the poor LCP score. Thus, for the people who want to secure high rankings and the ones that do not want to face a drop in rankings, make sure your LCP is optimized. 

Either you want to know how much LCP your website/ webpage scores or if you are facing any issues regarding the site's LCP. Then, contact professional SEO Services and be aware of your website health and overhaul at the right time.