When you run a WordPress website, site speed becomes the most important factor. Why? Your site speed and overall performance are critical for Google in determining search engine rankings. Site speed also affects user experience and engagement. This takes us to think about how to reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress?
Google is smart, and it uses several factors, including Core Web Vitals metrics, to judge and measure the quality of your website. One of these metrics is the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This metric determines how long the target elements on your website take to load for users.
Identifying the largest item on your page is the first step towards site speed optimization and improving LCP in WordPress to boost the site’s overall performance scores.
So, today, we’ll be focusing on the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), how to measure it, and strategies to reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress to boost performance score.
Let’s get started.
What is the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Its Importance
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a key metric that tells us how long it takes for the biggest element on your webpage to show up on the screen. Until this element loads, most of the page remains hidden.
This is because the LCP element is usually the first thing you see at the top of the page. LCP accounts for up to 25% of your PageSpeed Insights score, so improving it can really pump up your page speed.
The LCP element is often a large image or a block of text, but it could also be a video or animation. It might even be different depending on whether you’re viewing the page on a mobile device or a desktop. LCP is super important for how users experience your site and how quickly they feel like it’s loading.
If the largest part of the page doesn’t load quickly, it can really hurt the user experience. People might be staring at a nearly blank screen, waiting for the page to load, and they might even decide to quit the site.
It’s important to note that core web vitals scores, including LCP, are a ranking factor in Google. Poor LCP scores can lower your rankings in search engine results, leading to less organic traffic. Thus, it is important to understand how to reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress.
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How to Determine a Good LCP Score and Reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress
Thinking about how you can define a good LCP score and decide if you need to optimize it? Sure, checking your LCS score is important to reduce the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress. The Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console is a useful tool for monitoring WordPress LCP scores and identifying issues.
- A good LCP score is 2.5 seconds or less, which will give your page a green rating and a pass.
- If the LCP lies between 2.5 and 4 seconds, the score “needs improvement,” and you’ll get an orange rating.
- If the LCP is over 4 seconds, the score is considered “poor,” and it’s important to address this quickly.
If you want to maintain a good user experience and reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress, aim to have your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) at 2.5 seconds or less. To ensure that this goal is met for the majority of your users, it’s a good idea to measure the 75th percentile of page load times, taking into account both mobile and desktop devices.
Learn More: How to Fix Core Web Vitals Assessment Failed Issues in WordPress?
How to Measure Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress
In order to optimize and reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress, it’s important to measure LCP as part of your site’s performance and know what score you are at and what needs to be improved in order to attain a good score.
While there are many tools available online to test LCP in WordPress, the most effective one is Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool collects real-world performance databases from actual users and breaks down each score for you. On your URL’s page, you’ll find the LCP grade in both the Lab Data and Field Data sections (if available), along with PageSpeed tips to help you improve your site’s performance.
Not only does it show you the loading time, but it also highlights the specific element on your site that Google uses to measure Largest Contentful Paint. You can find this in the Diagnostics section further down the page.
Learn: How to Benchmark Your Website Performance
Since PageSpeed Insights focuses on individual pages, it’s a good idea to run multiple tests across different pages on your site.
For a more comprehensive analysis, be sure to use the Google search console or other tools to test your WordPress performance specified below:
Most of these speed test tools now include the ability to measure Largest Contentful Paint, giving you more flexibility to test from various locations, devices, and connection speeds.
Further reading: Key Metrics to Track the Impact of Your WordPress Optimization Efforts
Seahawk’s website speed test tool is an ideal fit if you are looking for a free website speed test. This tool is more than just a basic site speed checker; it gives you an in-depth analysis of your website’s health and functionality.
What Are The Factors Affecting LCP in WordPress?
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is all about how quickly the most important content on your site loads. Multiple issues can cause a slow WordPress backend. So, let’s explore the top five factors that can impact your LCP and what they mean for your site.
One of the primary factors affecting LCP is render-blocking resources, including CSS files. Optimizing CSS files by deferring non-critical CSS, minifying them, and using content delivery networks (CDNs) can significantly enhance your LCP score by reducing latency and improving loading times.
Heavy Images and Videos
Big images and videos are often the main culprits behind slow LCP times. When you have high-resolution images or videos that aren’t optimized, they take longer to load, which means your visitors are left waiting to see your content.
If these heavy files are placed right at the top of your page (above the fold), it can really drag down your load times and frustrate your users.
Read: How to Use Chrome UX Report to Improve Your Site Performance
Slow Server Response Times
Think of your server as the engine powering your website. If it’s slow to respond, everything else slows down, too—including how quickly your main content shows up.
A sluggish server can be caused by many things, like overloaded hosting or servers located far from your visitors. With slow server response times, your LCP suffers, and so does the user experience.
Read here: 30+ Actionable Ways to Speed Up WordPress Admin
Render-Blocking Resources
Sometimes, it is crucial to eliminate render-blocking resources, such as CSS and JavaScript files, to ensure the main content loads quickly. When these JavaScript and CSS files are too big or not optimized, they can block the rest of the page from loading as fast as they should. This is especially noticeable if these files are needed to display the content that shows up first on the page (above the fold).
Related: What Is Speed Index
Large Above-the-Fold Content
The content at the top of your page—the first thing visitors see—often includes big headers, hero images, or videos. If these elements aren’t optimized, they can take a while to load, delaying your LCP. This can be particularly frustrating for visitors on mobile devices or slower internet connections, where every second counts.
Know: 20+ Fastest WordPress Themes
Third-Party Scripts
Third-party scripts, like those used for ads, social media widgets, or analytics, can be a hidden source of delays. These scripts can slow down your page by using up resources that could be better spent loading your main content. Since these scripts are often loaded from external sites, they can be unpredictable, adding even more time to your page load.
Check out: Best WordPress Speed Optimization Services
How to Reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress to Boost Performance Score
Let’s discuss some of the best and proven ways to help reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress to boos your LCP score and website performance.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
This is one of the common ways to reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is like having a team of mini-servers stationed around the world, ready to deliver your website’s content to visitors as quickly as possible. These servers store copies of your site and step in whenever someone wants to visit, ensuring that your site loads from the closest location to them.
So, when a visitor clicks on your site, the CDN automatically sends them to the nearest data center. This means your content has less distance to travel, and your page loads faster—no more waiting around!
CDNs are built to speed things up, often loading content faster than your regular hosting server. This is great news for anyone looking to improve their site’s performance.
Optimize Your Images to Reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress
As we’ve talked about, LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is all about how quickly the biggest element on your page loads—and that’s usually an image or video. These files can be pretty hefty, which can slow down your site.
To fix this, it’s really important to optimize your images. If you’ve only got a few to work with, ImageOptim is a great image optimization plugin. But if you’re dealing with a bunch of images and thumbnails, Imagify is a lifesaver for bulk optimization. It slims down your image files without losing quality, saving you both time and headaches.
Know: Imagify vs Smush: Which is a Better Image Optimizer for WordPress?
Optimizing your images usually means converting them to a more efficient format or compressing them. The best part? The right tools can shrink your file sizes without noticeably affecting the quality, which means faster loading times and a smoother experience for your visitors while maintaining optimal performance in WordPress web design. A great way to reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress.
Know more: Essential Pillars of Website Performance
Minify CSS and JS Files
Another great way to reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress is by addressing render blocking JavaScript and minifying your CSS and JS files.
Minification is all about making your code leaner and more efficient. It involves stripping out unnecessary white spaces, line breaks, and comments from your code. By doing this, you reduce the size of your CSS and JS files, which helps them load faster.
Doing this manually is a bit complicated and time-consuming, especially if you are not into WordPress coding and do not have access to a WordPress developer.
This is where plugins come to the rescue. One of the most popular WordPress plugins for this is Autoptimize. This handy tool doesn’t just minify your scripts—it can also bundle them together, cache them, and even delay their loading to further enhance your website’s performance.
Read: How HTTP Caching Works And How to Use It
Testing the Autoptimize Plugin ⏱️
Using Autoptimize is super easy. Just install and activate it, then head over to the Settings → Autoptimize tab on your WordPress dashboard. From there, you can optimize your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS with just a few clicks.
When we tested this plugin, we managed to shrink our homepage size to 297.8 KB, and our loading time improved to 0.58 seconds. It might seem like a small change, but every little bit helps when it comes to speeding up your site!
Remove Unused JavaScript
Another way to tackle render-blocking resources is by removing unused JavaScript files. These files might be slowing down your site for two main reasons:
- They’re no longer needed: Sometimes, JavaScript files are left in the code even though they’re not used on your site anymore. They just sit there, taking up space and causing delays.
- They’re not essential for above-the-fold content: These files might still have a purpose (like tracking with Google Analytics), but they don’t need to load the visible content that first appears on the screen. Since they aren’t critical for building the DOM tree, they can unnecessarily delay the page load.
You can identify these unused JavaScript files in the PageSpeed report under the “Remove unused JavaScript” section. There are two main ways to handle this issue in WordPress:
Load JavaScript Only When Needed: Instead of loading JavaScript files on every page, you can configure them to load only when they’re actually required. Lazy loading is another important technique for improving LCP, which defers the loading of non-critical resources. For example, if a specific file is only needed on certain pages, it shouldn’t be loaded on others. Plugins like Perfmatters and Asset Cleanup can help manage this by disabling the execution of JavaScript on pages where it isn’t necessary.
Delay JavaScript Files: Another approach is to delay the loading of JavaScript files until there’s user interaction, such as scrolling or clicking a button. If the user doesn’t interact with the page, the JavaScript won’t load at all. This can prevent the files from being flagged by Lighthouse in the “Remove unused JavaScript” recommendation.
However, keep in mind that not all scripts listed in PageSpeed can be safely delayed. If you’re looking for a free plugin to delay JavaScript files, Flying Scripts is a good option.
Know more: WordPress Performance Optimization to Do Without Plugin
Remove Unused Plugins to Reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress
The plugins on your WordPress site can seriously affect your LCP score. Some plugins, especially those that are heavy on resources, can really slow things down—particularly if they’re loading lots of CSS or JavaScript that your site doesn’t even need. These unused scripts just add extra baggage, slowing down how quickly your content appears.
PageSpeed Insights is handy for this, as it gives you a list of problematic scripts, making it easier to see which plugins might be causing trouble. But let’s be real—if you’ve got a ton of plugins, sorting through them all can be pretty time-consuming.
A good place to start is by getting rid of any plugins you’re not using or that aren’t really necessary anymore. Once you’ve done that, you can look for more lightweight alternatives to replace any plugins that are essential to your site and reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress.
Reduce Your Server Response Time
Server response time, or Time to First Byte (TTFB), is how long it takes for your site’s content to start loading after someone clicks on your page. If your server takes its sweet time, it can cause delays that hurt your LCP score.
PageSpeed Insights points out that several factors can affect your server’s response time, including your plugins, themes, and hosting service. If you’ve already streamlined your site by removing unnecessary plugins and scripts, but your LCP score is still lagging, your server might be the culprit.
When that’s the case, it could be a sign that it’s time to upgrade your hosting plan. As your site grows and traffic picks up, switching to a more robust hosting plan can make a world of difference.
If your current web host does not provide features like a content delivery network (CDN), consider upgrading to a managed WordPress hosting plan that includes these optimizations. Managed WordPress hosting is a smart choice because it takes care of all the behind-the-scenes optimizations, so your site stays fast and smooth without you having to lift a finger.
Know: Reasons to Avoid Cheap Hosting for WordPress Websites
Compress Text Files
Compression is like packing your files into a smaller, lighter format, allowing them to load faster. By reducing the size of your text files, the transfer between the server and browser speeds up, leading to quicker load times and an improved LCP score. In simple terms, smaller files mean less time waiting for your page to fully load.
Two popular compression formats that can help with this are GZIP and Brotli. Both are widely supported and highly effective at shrinking file sizes without losing any content.
For WordPress users, much like image compression, enabling GZIP compression is straightforward. You can opt for plugins like the simple Enable Gzip Compression or go for more comprehensive options like WP Rocket, which includes GZIP compression as part of its package. Additionally, some hosting providers automatically enable GZIP compression, so you might not need to lift a finger. This helps in easy getting a easy way out to reduce Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress
Find Out: WP-Optimize Vs. WP Rocket: Detailed Comparison
Speed Optimization Isn’t A ONE-TIME Thing. Ongoing Monitoring Is Important
Trust us to set up monitoring tools to keep a close eye on your site’s performance over time.
Wrapping Up
By now, you should have a good sense of why Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is so important for your site’s performance and user experience and how you can improve it. Applying these optimization techniques will help boost your LCP score on your WordPress site.
A good LCP score means your site loads quickly, making your visitors happier and less likely to get frustrated. Fast loading times also improve your visibility in search results, which is a big win for your site.
In a nutshell, focusing on LCP and overall performance is key to creating a great user experience and keeping your site competitive.
