What It Is & How to Improve It

What Is Largest Contentful Paint?

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a user experience (UX) metric. It’s the time it takes between the browser starting to load a page and the largest content element (image or text block) on that page appearing on the screen.

LCP is one of the Core Web Vitals, a set of three metrics Google uses to measure a website’s performance in the context of UX. The other two are:

LCP, FID, and CLS are interconnected, with each one having an impact on the other two. For example, having a high LCP could also lead to a high FID due to the web browser not being able to respond to a user’s input until it loads the LCP element.

Note: FID will be replaced by Interaction to Next Paint (INP) in March 2024.

Largest Contentful Paint vs. First Contentful Paint

Don’t confuse LCP with First Contentful Paint (FCP). They’re two very different metrics.

While LCP measures the loading time of the largest element on the page, FCP measures the time between the page starting to load and the first visual element (not necessarily the largest) being rendered on the screen.

LCP is a better indicator of when a webpage is ready to be interacted with. FCP can be a bit misleading, since the first element loaded could be something very small—such as an empty image tag—instead of the main content of the page.

Why Is LCP Important for Website Performance?

People expect websites to load fast. Improving your LCP score means your website will load faster and be ready for users to...