Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 5 Ways to Improve It in WordPress

shukla7789 · Post by **shukla7789** » Sun Jan 19, 2025 4:24 am

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 5 Ways to Improve It
The overall performance of your site can significantly impact your search engine rankings. Google uses several metrics to measure the quality of your site, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Therefore, improving your LCP score can help your website perform better and rank higher in SERPs .

Fortunately, you don't need a lot of technical expertise to get started. By identifying the heaviest element on your page, you can take the necessary steps to optimize your content and speed up your site.

In this post, we will look at how to measure LCP. Then, we will bolivia phone number data five strategies that can help you improve your Largest Contentful Paint score in WordPress.

Let's get started!

Table of Contents view
How to measure the largest contentful paint
In 2020, Google introduced the Core Web Vitals project . The popular search engine uses this set of metrics to measure the performance and quality of your site.

One of these metrics is called Largest Contentful Paint, and it measures how long it takes a page to fully load the largest element on the screen. In most cases, this content is a prominent visual element like a slider or hero.

You can measure your LCP score using Google's PageSpeed Insights . This tool collects real performance data from multiple users and provides a breakdown of each score:

A PageSpeed Insights report showing the highest score for content painting
In addition to giving you the timing, it will also identify the actual element on your site that Google uses to determine the largest content in the Diagnostics section further down the page.

How to find the Largest Contentful Paint element
Most other speed test tools can also now test the largest contentful paint, which can give you a little more flexibility for testing from different locations, devices, and connection speeds.

According to Google, a good LCP score should be 2.5 seconds or less. If the largest element of your pages takes longer to load, it can cause a poor user experience (UX). This can, in turn, lead to a higher bounce rate . Therefore, it is essential to optimize your site to achieve a better LCP score.

Five Ways to Improve Largest Contentful Paint in WordPress
As we've seen, your LCP score plays a huge role in your site's overall performance. With that in mind, let's take a look at five effective ways to improve this score and make your website load faster!

Optimize your images
Remove render-blocking resources
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
Remove unused plugins
Reduce your server response times
1. Optimize your images
As mentioned above, LCP measures the time it takes a website to render the largest element on the page. Media files like images and videos tend to be the largest files.

To solve this problem, it is essential to optimize your images . In fact, this method is recommended in your PageSpeed Insights report

PageSpeed Insights' Image Resizing Recommendations Can Improve Your LCP Score
To resize your images and optimize them with tactics like compression and webP format , you can use an image optimization tool like Optimole :

Image Optimization by Optimole – Lazy Load, CDN, Convert WebP & AVIF
Author(s): Optimole

94%
Ratings
200,000+
Installs
WP 5.5+
Requirements
More info
optimole-wp.3.13.9.zip

Current Version: 3.13.9

Last Updated: 26/11/2024

94%
Ratings
200,000+
Installs
WP 5.5+
Requirements
WordPress.org Plugin PageImage Optimization by Optimole – Lazy Load, CDN, Convert WebP & AVIF
This plugin optimizes your WordPress images in real time and makes sure that every graphic is scaled correctly for different devices. It also compresses your photos without compromising their quality.

Additionally, Optimole will serve your images via a content delivery network (CDN). This way, when someone visits your website, the optimized graphics will be loaded from the closest network location instead of your WordPress site’s server, reducing download speed.

By resizing and compressing your images, you can significantly increase the speed of your site. Smaller files will load faster, which in turn will improve your LCP score.

2. Eliminate render-blocking resources
Render-blocking resources are HTML , CSS , and JavaScript files that force browsers to delay rendering content on your site. As a result, these elements increase page load times, which results in a poor LCP score.

You can fix this loading issue by eliminating render-blocking elements or forcing them to run after everything else has loaded. Fortunately, this process is easier than it sounds.