SEO
How To Optimize The Largest Contentful Paint & Rank Higher
How To Measure The Largest Contentful Paint Of Your Website
Run a free website speed test to find out. Your LCP speed will be displayed immediately.
The results of your speed test will tell you if:
- The LCP threshold is met.
- You need to optimize any other Core Web Vital.
How Is The Largest Contentful Paint Calculated?
Google looks at the 75th percentile of experiences – that means 25% of real website visitors experience LCP load times of 3.09 seconds or higher, while for 75% of users the LCP is below 3.09 seconds.
In this example, the real-user LCP is shown as 3.09 seconds.
What Are The Lab Test Results On My Core Web Vitals Data?
With this specific web speed test, you’ll also see lab metrics that were collected in a controlled test environment. While these metrics don’t directly impact Google rankings, there are two advantages of this data:
- The metrics update as soon as you improve your website, while Google’s real-time data will take 28 days to fully update.
- You get detailed reports in addition to the metrics, which can help you optimize your website.
Additionally, PageSpeed Insights also provides lab data, but keep in mind that the data it reports can sometimes be misleading due to the simulated throttling it uses to emulate a slower network connection.
How Do You Find Your Largest Contentful Paint Element?
When you run a page speed test with DebugBear, the LCP element is highlighted in the test result.
Sometimes, the LCP element may be a large image, and other times, it could be a large portion of text.
Regardless of whether your LCP element is an image or a piece of text, the LCP content won’t appear until your page starts rendering.
For example, on the page below, a background image is responsible for the largest paint.
In contrast, this page’s LCP is a paragraph of text.
To improve the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of your website you need to ensure that the HTML element responsible for the LCP appears quickly.
How To Improve The Largest Contentful Paint
To improve the LCP you need to:
- Find out what resources are necessary to make the LCP element appear.
- See how you can load those resources faster (or not at all).
For example, if the LCP element is a photo, you could reduce the file size of the image.
After running a DebugBear speed test, you can click on each performance metric to view more information on how it could be optimized.
Common resources that affect the LCP are:
- Render-blocking resources.
- Images that are not optimized.
- Outdated image formats.
- Fonts that are not optimized.
How To Reduce Render-Blocking Resources
Render-blocking resources are files that need to be downloaded before the browser can start drawing page content on the screen. CSS stylesheets are typically render-blocking, as are many script tags.
To reduce the performance impact of render-blocking resources you can:
- Identify what resources are render-blocking.
- Review if the resource is necessary.
- Review if the resource needs to block rendering.
- See if the resource can be loaded more quickly up, for example using compression.
The Easy Way: In the DebugBear request waterfall, requests for render-blocking resources are marked with a “Blocking” tag.
How To Prioritize & Speed Up LCP Image Requests
For this section, we’re going to leverage the new “fetchpriority” attribute on images to help your visitor’s browsers quickly identify what image should load first.
Use this attribute on your LCP element.
Why?
When just looking at the HTML, browsers often can’t immediately tell what images are important. One image might end up being a large background image, while another one might be a small part of the website footer.
Accordingly, all images are initially considered low priority, until the page has been rendered and the browser knows where the image appears.
However, that can mean that the browser only starts downloading the LCP image fairly late.
The new Priority Hints web standard allows website owners to provide more information to help browsers prioritize images and other resources.
In the example below, we can see that the browser spends a lot of time waiting, as indicated by the gray bar.
We would choose this LCP image to add the “fetchpriority” attribute to.
How To Add The “FetchPriority” Attribute To Images
Simply adding the fetchpriority=”high” attribute to an HTML img tag will the browser will prioritize downloading that image as quickly as possible.
<img src="https://www.searchenginejournal.com/optimize-largest-contentful-paint-debugbear-spcs/471883/photo.jpg" fetchpriority="high" />
How To Use Modern Image Formats & Size Images Appropriately
High-resolution images can often have a large file size, which means they take a long time to download.
In the speed test result below you can see that by looking at the dark blue shaded areas. Each line indicates a chunk of the image arriving in the browser.
There are two approaches to reducing image sizes:
- Ensure the image resolution is as low as possible. Consider serving images at different resolutions depending on the size of the user’s device.
- Use a modern image format like WebP, which can store images of the same quality at a lower file size.
How To Optimize Font Loading Times
If the LCP element is an HTML heading or paragraph, then it’s important to load the font for this chunk of text quickly.
One way to achieve this would be to use preload tags that can tell the browser to load the fonts early.
The font-display: swap CSS rule can also ensure sped-up rendering, as the browser will immediately render the text with a default font before switching to the web font later on.
Monitor Your Website To Keep The LCP Fast
Continuously monitoring your website not only lets you verify that your LCP optimizations are working, but also makes sure you get alerted if your LCP gets worse.
DebugBear can monitor the Core Web Vitals and other site speed metrics over time. In addition to running in-depth lab-based tests, the product also keeps track of the real-user metrics from Google.
Try DebugBear with a free 14-day trial.
SEO
Executive Director Of WordPress Resigns
Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of the WordPress Project, officially announced her resignation, ending a nine-year tenure. This comes just two weeks after Matt Mullenweg launched a controversial campaign against a managed WordPress host, which responded by filing a federal lawsuit against him and Automattic.
She posted an upbeat notice on her personal blog, reaffirming her belief in the open source community as positive economic force as well as the importance of strong opinions that are “loosely held.”
She wrote:
“This week marks my last as the Executive Director of the WordPress project. My time with WordPress has transformed me, both as a leader and an advocate. There’s still more to do in our shared quest to secure a self-sustaining future of the open source project that we all love, and my belief in our global community of contributors remains unchanged.
…I still believe that open source is an idea that can transform generations. I believe in the power of a good-hearted group of people. I believe in the importance of strong opinions, loosely held. And I believe the world will always need the more equitable opportunities that well-maintained open source can provide: access to knowledge and learning, easy-to-join peer and business networks, the amplification of unheard voices, and a chance to tap into economic opportunity for those who weren’t born into it.”
Turmoil At WordPress
The resignation comes amidst the backdrop of a conflict between WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and the managed WordPress web host WP Engine, which has brought unprecedented turmoil within the WordPress community, including a federal lawsuit filed by WP Engine accusing Mullenweg of attempted extortion.
Resignation News Was Leaked
The news about the resignation was leaked on October 2nd by the founder of the WordPress news site WP Tavern (now owned by Matt Mullenweg), who tweeted that he had spoken with Josepha that evening, who announced her resignation.
He posted:
“I spoke with Josepha tonight. I can confirm that she’s no longer at Automattic.
She’s working on a statement for the community. She’s in good spirits despite the turmoil.”
Screenshot Of Deleted Tweet
Josepha tweeted the following response the next day:
“Ok, this is not how I expected that news to come to y’all. I apologize that this is the first many of you heard of it. Please don’t speculate about anything.”
Rocky Period For WordPress
While her resignation was somewhat of an open secret it’s still a significant event because of recent events at WordPress, including the resignations of 8.4% of Automattic employees as a result of an offer of a generous severance package to all employees who no longer wished to work there.
Read the official announcement:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Wirestock Creators
SEO
8% Of Automattic Employees Choose To Resign
WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO announced today that he offered Automattic employees the chance to resign with a severance pay and a total of 8.4 percent. Mullenweg offered $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever one is higher, with a total of 159 people taking his offer.
Reactions Of Automattic Employees
Given the recent controversies created by Mullenweg, one might be tempted to view the walkout as a vote of no-confidence in Mullenweg. But that would be a mistake because some of the employees announcing their resignations either praised Mullenweg or simply announced their resignation while many others tweeted how happy they are to stay at Automattic.
One former employee tweeted that he was sad about recent developments but also praised Mullenweg and Automattic as an employer.
He shared:
“Today was my last day at Automattic. I spent the last 2 years building large scale ML and generative AI infra and products, and a lot of time on robotics at night and on weekends.
I’m going to spend the next month taking a break, getting married, and visiting family in Australia.
I have some really fun ideas of things to build that I’ve been storing up for a while. Now I get to build them. Get in touch if you’d like to build AI products together.”
Another former employee, Naoko Takano, is a 14 year employee, an organizer of WordCamp conferences in Asia, a full-time WordPress contributor and Open Source Project Manager at Automattic announced on X (formerly Twitter) that today was her last day at Automattic with no additional comment.
She tweeted:
“Today was my last day at Automattic.
I’m actively exploring new career opportunities. If you know of any positions that align with my skills and experience!”
Naoko’s role at at WordPress was working with the global WordPress community to improve contributor experiences through the Five for the Future and Mentorship programs. Five for the Future is an important WordPress program that encourages organizations to donate 5% of their resources back into WordPress. Five for the Future is one of the issues Mullenweg had against WP Engine, asserting that they didn’t donate enough back into the community.
Mullenweg himself was bittersweet to see those employees go, writing in a blog post:
“It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit.
However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!”
Read the entire announcement on Mullenweg’s blog:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/sdx15
SEO
YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features
YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.
- YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
- New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
- YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.
-
WORDPRESS3 days ago
WordPress biz Automattic details WP Engine deal demands • The Register
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 30, 2024
-
SEO7 days ago
Yoast Co-Founder Suggests A WordPress Contributor Board
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Google Volatility With Gains & Losses, Updated Web Spam Policies, Cache Gone & More Search News
-
SEO7 days ago
6 Things You Can Do to Compete With Big Sites
-
SEARCHENGINES4 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: October 1, 2024
-
SEO6 days ago
An In-Depth Guide For Businesses
-
AFFILIATE MARKETING6 days ago
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Praises Nuclear Energy to Power AI
You must be logged in to post a comment Login