Google has different ranking factors to judge a website’s performance. It includes friendliness, domain age, authority, URL, LCP, etc. You would know most of these metrics as a website owner, but what is LCP?
When you talk about SEO, page loading speed is a factor an owner must consider. Because if the site takes much longer to load, the chances of the reader leaving the page are higher. It increases nothing but the bounce rate of your website, which isn’t a good sign for the long run. Google also considers that the users were satisfied with your website, and the experience wasn’t the most appropriate.
Keeping all of these in mind, the company has created a new metric: LCP. This blog will walk you through what LCP is & how to measure your website’s LCP to optimize it.
Table of Contents
What Is The Largest Contentful Paint?
LCP (largest contentful paint) is a Google user experience metric that is now an important ranking factor. It measures a website’s. Time to show the content to the visitor. It sometimes also counts the loading time of the content relevant to the user to calculate the LCP score. This includes images, tags, video thumbnails, background images, and text elements such as paragraphs, headings, and lists.
How To Measure Your Website’s LCP Score?
There are two ways to measure your website’s LCP score. You can do it directly on the site using the “field” method or “the lab mode.” In both methods, you use the tools that help make the measurement more accurate and speed up the work.
For the field method, you can use the following tools:
- Chrome user experience report
- Page speed insights
- Search console (core web vitals report)
Now, for the lab tools, you can use these:
- Chrome DevTools
- Lighthouse
- WebPage test
LCP is easily accessible on all these tools as Google designs this metric for measuring the website’s performance.
What Is A Good LCP Web Vitals Score?
It’s essential to know the minimum performance standard expected from your website. There is particular demand from Google algorithm to judge the loading time of your website. 2.5 seconds is considered a good result of LCP. Monitoring your website constantly is significant to know it is not facing issues loading and it’s taking 2.5 seconds only to load.
How To Improve The LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)?
Monitoring and optimizing your website is the key to bringing positive results and maintaining a good LCP score. Below is the list of tips to optimize your website’s largest contentful paint.
1. Utilize CDN Service For Images For LCP
A content delivery network is a tool that improves your site’s traffic management. This service can make your page images load faster as well. It optimizes and transforms image sizes in real time using the additional software Image CDN.
2. Select A Good & Reliable Hosting Service
The quality of your web hosting service is one of the things that affect the overall performance of your website. Choose the hosting service that can offer an adequate infrastructure and fits your site’s specifications. It can help you improve the load speed.
3. Optimize Image Sizes For LCP
Choosing the right size for your website’s image is vital if you do not want your LCP score to drop. Your hosting service will suggest you the image size ideal. Do not overload.
4. Do Not Use JavaScript To Load The Image
Images are the most significant element to be loaded on a page. Using Javascript is relatively straightforward to create an image for your page, but it can slow down the loading process. So the best thing to do is leave the work to your browser. This will help you avoid any delay, keeping the LCP score in check.
5. Compress Text Resource
Compressing will be an excellent method to optimize text resources like CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. This can reload faster due to a smaller file size, resulting in a better LCP score.
Conclusion
Twebpage’s loading speed is one of the important ranking factors for Google. Therefore, maintaining and optimizing your webpage loading faster can improve the LCP score. Above, we have mentioned some of the best tools to use to measure the score of your webpage and optimize it when the speed is above 2.5 seconds.
