Mastering Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) For Optimal SEO Performance

Largest Contentful Paint is a metric that is used widely to measure the user’s experience while they visit your website. LCP values shows how your website stands out among your competitors. How to improve your LCP is a good question SEO professionals need to ask earnestly. In this blog, you will get to know what is LCP and how to improve LCP like a PRO. We’ll explore some effective tips and best practices to enhance your website’s user experience.

What is LCP?

If you are hearing the term for the first time, you may ask what is LCP? LCP Stands for Largest Contentful Paint. It is a widely accepted metric to measure the overall usability and user experience of the end-user. Core web vitals guide, also known as performance metric by Google values recognizes if your website has the standard LCP score. When a user searches ‘ red cardigan for women’ on your website and it fails to load the images related to the search right away is a classic example of a lack of LCP SEO. 

The largest Contentful Paint element measures the entire loading speed of the website and user experience in a bird’s eye view. LCP is a value that reflects how long time it takes to render the largest content on a website. If the value of LCP is low, it is good for your user experience. If it takes a long time to load the largest contentful paint, it will adversely impact your business in many ways as follows:

• User experience – User experience will increase as end users find the information can be retrieved easily without taking a huge amount of time. 

• Search rankings – SERP Rank will be on top as low LCP and other metrics of user experience provide a boost in SERP ranking. 

• Organic Traffic – Nowadays dwell time SEO and organic traffic can be attained if you really adhere to the Core web vital guide, which includes a low LPC score. Your target needs information right away and if so they will come back to your website content. 

In short, how to improve LCP is a question that needs to be answered and deployed because it is a necessity rather than a want. You can use Page Speed Insights to get an understanding of minute details about the metric. Besides, such an analysis provides you with the best measures to be taken for improving LCP. Reasons for LCP score vary, but slow server response time, render-blocking javascript and CSS, slow resource load times and client-side rendering are major causes. 

How to improve LCP

If you follow these basic steps, you will get to know how to improve LCP effectively. 2.5 seconds is considered to be the best LCP score. What is largest contentful paint optimization mean for you to reflect on your website? 

How to optimise largest contentful paint

• Add speculation rules 

Adding a speculation rule is one of the best ways to ensure the largest contentful paint metric. It tells the web browser to load other pages before a user demands them once they are on your website. For example, If you are looking at services, adding speculation rules directs pages towards a payment gateway or blog section dealing with the same topic. Instant navigation of other pages helps you capture the attention of searchers and engagement. You can implement speculation rules on your website by adding them through a script tag. 

• Real-time data optimisation

Using real-time and real person data, you can optimize LCP. PageSpeed Insights tool provides lab as well as real user data. Based on the result, you can improvise your LCP. Real-time data provides insights about diverse experiences and it works well with end-users. Besides, you can also use real user monitoring to get the details about elements which cause LCP rendering. 

• Employ a Content Delivery Network 

Employing a content delivery network is easy and very helpful when it comes to decreasing server response time. If you have a CDN network distributed in various locations,  the user will have information in peak times of traffic without any delay. It is noted that CDN handles data better than a server alone. Therefore, your site will load faster than usual resulting in a Good LCP score. 

• Image size matters

Images bag lower importance in the hierarchy of elements for an HTML tag. So, you need to consider the Image size in LCP. On the other hand, sizing your image is also a key point to be taken; as big images take a lot of time to load on your website. It is advisable to use images of smaller sizes suitable for viewport. If needed, you may try compressing of images. 

• Monitor the speed of the website periodically

Periodical analysis of website page loading is invaluable in correcting your LCP score. This will reveal if the optimization strategies work well with real audiences and what are the constraint elements for a good LCP Score. For example, you may use any renowned website monitoring tool to get valuable information not only on your website but on competitors too. 

• Hosting providers make a difference 

Hosting providers can either break or make your website page loading speed including LCP score because it involves faster data transmission from the server to the end-user. You need to choose web hosting service providers wisely as they play a role in overall website performance such as speed, latency and uptime. Reliability during high traffic and scalability are considered qualities.

After skimming this blog post, you now know the answer to the question 

What is largest contentful paint? LCP will remain a vital metric to be used for user experience and learning to master it to improve LCP score is essential for your business success. Web development services in Dubai provide the best website development services while considering how to fix the largest contentful paint metric into your website. Each website is unique and how your website responds to Google’s core web vitals can determine your online exposure.