Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – Defined, Measured, & How to Fix

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the amount of time it takes to load the single largest visible element in the viewport. It represents the website being visually loaded and is one of the three Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics Google uses to measure page experience.

The first impression users have of your site is how fast it appears to be loaded.

The largest element is usually going to be a featured image or maybe the <h1> tag. But it could also be any ofthese:

• <img> element
• <image> element inside an <svg> element
• Image inside a <video> element
• Background image loaded with the url() function
• Blocks oftext

<svg> and <video> may be added in the future.

Anything outside the viewport or any overflow is not considered when figuring out the size. If an image occupies the entire viewport, it’s not considered forLCP.

Let’s look at how fast your LCP should be and how to improve it.

A good LCP value is less than 2.5 seconds and should be based on Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data. This is data from actual users of Chrome who are on your site and have opted in to sharing this information. You need 75% of page visits to load in 2.5 seconds orless.

Your page may be classified into one of the following buckets:

• Good: <=2.5s
• Needs improvement: >2.5s and <=4s
• Poor: >4s

LCP data

57.1% of sites are in the good LCP bucket as of April 2023. This is averaged across the site. As we mentioned, you need...