LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
LCP measures how long it takes for the largest piece of content on screen to appear.
Also known as: largest contentful paint · loading speed
Usually that is the hero image or the main heading. It is the closest single number to the visitor’s question: "has this page opened yet?"
The usual causes of a bad LCP are an uncompressed hero image, a font that blocks rendering, and a server that is slow to answer. Of those, the image is almost always the biggest.
Common questions
How do we improve it?
Compress the hero image and serve it in a modern format, preload it, stop fonts from blocking the first paint, and make sure the server responds quickly. Lazy loading the hero image makes LCP worse, not better.
Does a video count?
The poster frame does. That is why a hero video should always have one — without it the metric waits for the video.
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