What is LCP? (Largest Contentful Paint)

Let’s keep this simple: LCP measures how long it takes for the biggest (and most important) piece of content on your page to fully load. Usually, this is your hero image, a large heading, or that shiny new promo video you want everyone to see first.

Why LCP is important?

LCP isn’t just a tech buzzword—it’s a make-or-break metric for your website’s performance. If your LCP is slow, users get bored and bounce your conversions tank, and Google pushes you further down in search results. But speed things up? That’s where the magic happens.

🔍 SEO Boost: LCP is a major player in Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV). A sluggish LCP can knock you down in search rankings—here’s why CWV matters.
💡 User Experience: If users don’t see anything load, they’ll leave faster than you can say “high bounce rate.” A quick LCP means higher engagement and more happy clicks.
💰 Revenue Impact: Even giants like Amazon found that every 100ms delay could shave 1% off sales—and let’s be honest, no one wants to leave money on the table.

How to test LCP?

Before you can improve your LCP, you need to know where you stand. There are several ways to check your LCP:

1️⃣Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI):

Just enter your URL, and PSI will analyze your page’s performance on both mobile and desktop devices. It provides an LCP score based on real-world user data (from the Chrome User Experience Report or CrUX) and lab data for controlled testing.

🔍 What makes this tool unique?

• Combines field data (real-world user experiences) and lab data (simulated performance tests) for a well-rounded analysis.

• Offers a tailored to-do list to help you tackle the most urgent LCP issues.

📌 Pro Tip: Scroll down to the Diagnostics section for detailed insights. You can even filter results to focus on the specific factors affecting LCP.

2️⃣Chrome DevTools (Performance tab):

Open Chrome’s Performance tab, hit Record, and reload your page. It will highlight the exact moment your LCP occurs.

🔍 What makes this tool unique?
Unlike other testing tools, DevTools gives you a frame-by-frame breakdown of your page load. You can:

• You get a frame-by-frame breakdown of what’s slowing down your page.

• Find out whether images, CSS, or third-party scripts are causing trouble.

• Perfect for anyone who likes playing detective with their site’s performance.

3️⃣Google Search Console (Core Web Vitals report):

This tool gives you a site-wide overview of LCP issues, based on real-world performance data collected from users visiting your site on Chrome.

🔍 What makes this tool unique?

• Provides insights at scale by analyzing LCP across all your pages, not just a single URL.

• Highlights recurring LCP issues on specific devices (desktop vs. mobile) or regions, helping you identify patterns.

• Tracks performance changes over time, so you can measure the impact of any optimizations.

📌 Pro Tip: Use the Core Web Vitals Report to prioritize fixing issues on pages with the highest traffic first—this will give you the biggest SEO gains with the least effort.

What’s a good LCP score?

✅ Good: ≤ 2.5 seconds (Fast and user-friendly)
⚠️ Needs Improvement: 2.5–4.0 seconds (There’s potential here)
❌ Poor: > 4.0 seconds (Time for some serious optimization magic)

How to optimize LCP?

Improving Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is all about getting your most important content—like images, videos, or headlines—on the screen faster. This means shrinking file sizes, speeding up delivery, and making sure the right content loads first. The faster your site feels, the happier your users will be. Here are some practical tips, examples, and success stories to help you make it happen.

Optimize images and media

💡 Why? Images and videos are often the largest content elements, directly impacting LCP. Optimizing them can lead to major speed improvements.

1. Use Next-gen image formats (WebP, AVIF)
WebP and AVIF offer 30-50% better compression than JPEG/PNG without compromising quality. Converting images to WebP, for example, can reduce LCP by 20% and shrink page size by 48%, significantly improving loading times (ITNEXT).

📌 How to do it?
Convert images using:

• Squoosh (manual conversion)

• Cloudflare Polish (automated WebP conversion)

• WordPress plugins like Smush or ShortPixel

Tip: Use the <picture> element to serve the best image format for each browser while keeping a backup. Some older browsers don’t support WebP or AVIF, so this ensures everyone gets a properly optimized image.

<picture>
  <source srcset="image.avif" type="image/avif">
  <source srcset="image.webp" type="image/webp">
  <img src="image.jpg" alt="Optimized image">
</picture>

2. Use Responsive images (Different sizes for different screens)
Large desktop images don’t need to load on mobile devices—using responsive images ensures the right size loads for each screen, which can significantly improve LCP (the BBC saw a 25% reduction using this approach).

📌 How to do it?

• Use the srcset attribute to serve different image sizes based on the screen size.

<img src="image-large.jpg"
     srcset="image-small.jpg 480w, image-medium.jpg 1024w"
     sizes="(max-width: 600px) 480px, 1024px"
     alt="Responsive image">

3. Lazy Load Images
Lazy loading prevents non-visible images from blocking LCP, but avoid lazy-loading important images (like hero banners) since it can delay the page’s main content from loading.

📌 How to do it?

• Use native lazy loading for below-the-fold images.

<img src="below-the-fold.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="Lazy-loaded image">

• Ensure above-the-fold images (like hero banners) are preloaded instead:

<link rel="preload" as="image" href="hero-image.webp" type="image/webp">

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

💡 Why? A Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps speed up LCP by caching images, scripts, and other assets on globally distributed servers. This reduces the time it takes for a page’s largest element to load, especially for users far from your main server.

In simple terms: Think of a CDN as setting up mini-warehouses around the world. Instead of making every user wait for your main server to deliver content, they get it from the closest "warehouse," which loads the page faster—no matter where they are.

📌 How to do it?

• Use a CDN provider such as Cloudflare, Fastly, or Akamai to serve static assets closer to your users.

• If you’re using WordPress, try enabling Jetpack’s Image CDN or a similar service to automatically optimize and speed up image delivery.

• Set up your CDN to cache images, fonts, CSS, and JavaScript efficiently by adjusting its settings—this usually means enabling automatic caching and setting proper expiration times. Just make sure dynamic content, like shopping cart data or live updates, stays fresh and doesn’t get cached by mistake.

Reduce Render-Blocking Resources (CSS & JavaScript)

💡 Why? If a webpage has large CSS or JavaScript files, the browser has to download, parse, and execute them before rendering the main content, delaying LCP.

In simple terms: It’s like waiting for all the decorations to be put up before you can open the door to a party. The bigger the decorations (CSS and JavaScript), the longer your visitors wait to get in and enjoy the main content.

1. Minify & Compress CSS & JavaScript

• Reducing CSS and JS file size helps speed up the loading process.

• Using compression like Gzip or Brotli reduces the time required to transfer assets.

📌 How to do it?

• Minify CSS & JavaScript using Terser (for JS) or CSSNano (for CSS).

• Enable compression on your server (gzip or brotli).

• Defer non-essential JavaScript using:

<script src="script.js" defer></script>

2. Load Critical CSS Inline & Defer the Rest

• The browser needs some CSS to render the page properly—this should load as early as possible.

• Move critical CSS inline to avoid blocking rendering.

📌 How to do it?

• Inline critical styles:

<style>
  .hero { background: url('hero.webp') no-repeat center; }
</style>

• A trick to defer non-critical CSS using media="print"

Instead of blocking page rendering, we can instruct the browser to load non-critical CSS asynchronously by initially setting it for print media and then applying it once it loads:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" media="print" 
  onload="this.onload=null;this.removeAttribute('media');">

🔍 How does this work?

• The media="print" attribute prevents the stylesheet from blocking the page during the initial render.

• Once the stylesheet is fully loaded, the onload event removes the media="print" attribute, making it apply normally.

• This helps improve LCP by ensuring the page renders faster without waiting for non-critical styles.

Improve server response time

💡 Why? A slow Time to First Byte (TTFB) means your site takes longer to respond when someone tries to visit. It’s like calling a friend and waiting forever for them to pick up. The faster your server responds, the quicker your page starts loading—boosting your LCP and overall speed.

1. Use caching
Start by implementing full-page caching for static content, so frequently accessed pages load faster without having to fetch data from scratch every time. For dynamic content, tools like Redis or Memcached can cache database queries, reducing the time it takes to retrieve information and improving overall performance.

2. Avoid Slow Third-Party Scripts
To improve loading speed, either remove or defer slow third-party elements like widgets, ads, or analytics scripts. These external tools can block your page from loading quickly, so it’s best to delay their loading until after the main content appears or eliminate the ones that aren’t essential.

Font optimization

💡 Why? Web fonts can block your page from displaying until they’re fully loaded, which delays LCP and makes users wait longer to see the content. If not optimized, your visitors might experience a flash of invisible text or a layout shift when the font finally loads. Loading fonts efficiently ensures that text appears quickly and keeps your page looking polished from the start.

• Preload fonts
  Critical fonts should be preloaded to ensure they load early, helping prevent layout shifts and ensuring your text appears smoothly as soon as the page starts loading. This improves both user experience and overall page speed.

📌 How to do it?

• Add font preloading in <head>:

<link rel="preload" href="fonts/Roboto.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" 
  crossorigin="anonymous">

• Use font-display: swap to avoid invisible text issues:

How Speculative preloading changes the game

What if your site could load pages before visitors even clicked?

That’s the magic of speculative preloading—predicting user actions and preloading pages ahead of time. It’s like reading your visitors’ minds (without being creepy).

Instead of waiting for a click, the page is already loaded by the time the user arrives. This drastically reduces waiting time and makes the LCP feel nearly instant, creating a smooth, seamless browsing experience.

Case Studies:

• Google Search Case Study: Google implemented prefetching in search results, significantly cutting page load times and giving users a 58.6ms head start when clicking on the first two search results—making the experience feel faster and more seamless.

• Ray-Ban Case Study: By configuring prerendering Ray-Ban got their LCP improved by 43% on Mobile and 42% on desktop. Inevitably resulting in a reduced bounce rate & increased conversions by preloading product pages. 

How Navigation AI makes this accessible to everyone

🚀 Navigation AI takes speculative preloading to the next level, making it effortless for site owners and marketers to improve LCP without technical complexity.

🔧 Fully automated for maximum speed

• No need for manual tuning, A/B testing, or complex optimizations.

• Navigation AI intelligently predicts user behavior and preloads the right pages at the right time.

• Works in the background, continuously optimizing without extra effort from you.

🌎 Works on any website

| Category              | Platforms                                      |
|----------------------|----------------------------------------------|
| Ecommerce           | Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Salesforce    |
| Content & Business  | WordPress, Squarespace                       |
| Custom Websites     | Any site where <head> edits are possible

📊 Real-World Performance Gains

• Up to 68% LCP improvement in prerendered navigation 🚀 (Link to be added)

• Faster perceived speed = lower bounce rates and higher engagement.

• Users experience an almost instant transition between pages, keeping them on your site longer.

💡 Why This Matters for Your Business

• Better SEO: Google rewards fast-loading sites with higher rankings.

• More Conversions: Faster experiences mean more sales and sign-ups.

• Happier Users: No waiting = better engagement and brand perception.

Instead of spending hours fine-tuning performance settings, Navigation AI does the work for you—automatically making your site faster, more responsive, and more competitive. 🚀

Final thoughts

LCP isn’t just a vanity metric—it’s directly tied to SEO, user experience, and sales. If you want faster load times and better performance across the board, Navigation AI does the heavy lifting—predicting user behavior and preloading pages automatically.

🚀 Faster LCP = Better Rankings, More Engagement, and Higher Revenue.