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Now that Google has updated its user experience metrics, SEO professionals need to focus on finding LCP (largest contentful paint). But what is LCP? Why is it so important? How to find LCP? How can it improve a site’s ranking and help you improve your business? In this article, we have tried to answer all these questions and address other issues related to the LCP standard.

What is the largest contentful paint?

If you’ve been following SEO news and information, you’ve probably got information about updating Google’s user experience metrics. In a nutshell, this update gives points to sites that offer a great experience for their users. The quality of the site user experience is measured by several criteria, including Core Web Vitals.

According to a statement first released by Google in 2020, Core Web Vitals consists of three criteria. LCP, FID (First Contentful Paint), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) criteria. In this article, we only look at the LCP criteria and how to find them. The LCP shows the load time of the page. It measures the rendering time of the largest portion of a page’s content (such as a large, high-color image or high-resolution graphic design).

Therefore, the LCP completely measures the time for the user to view such sections. You should note that LCP is different from First Paint (when it takes time for the first pixels of a webpage to load) and First Contentful Paint (when the first text or image of the webpage is displayed).

According to the LCP standard, you should display the largest portion of your site page content in 2.5 seconds or less. The display speed of such sections is good if it is between 2.5 to 4 seconds. But this time must also improve over time. If the loading speed of large sections of content is more than 4 seconds, it can be said that this time is not very slow. But since it reduces the quality of your page, you should check and correct it immediately.

Why is the LCP standard important?

Before explaining finding an LCP, let’s first look at the importance of LCP in improving a site’s page rank. If you are one of those people who have worked hard to improve and optimize your site page speed, you may be wondering why the LCP metric is so important. The answer to this question should be sought to increase the importance and attention of Google to the user experience.

For example, if you enable asynchronous loading, your page text will probably load very hard before loading multimedia files. Google can now measure the load time of such multimedia files with the Largest Contentful Paint metric so you can better measure your full-screen speed (not just page text load speed).

Finding its benchmark for SEO is especially important, given Google’s recent web page user experience updates. These updates were completed at the end of August 2021. Following this new move by Google, the user experience of the site pages is now officially considered a major factor in the ranking of the pages. Your site’s user experience has a huge impact on SERP conditions, traffic levels, and potential traffic.

How to find LCP?

Based on the above description, it was found that LCP is one of the most important criteria in Google, which is used to measure work experience.

Your site page and ranking are used. But how do you find LCP? Studies have shown that you can use several sources or tools to find LCP. If you want to see information about real users, it will be easy to find LCP with the following tools or resources:

• Your Chrome user experience report tool (CrUX)
• Report your PageSpeed ​​Insights
• Core Web Vitals Search Console Report
• JavaScript library web-vitals

Also, if you want to see the information collected about automated and controlled tests, it is possible to find it using the following tools:

• Chrome DevTools
• Lighthouse on Google
• Catchpoint in Webpagetest

If you are good at using JavaScript, you can even use the Largest Contentful Paint API. While LCP tracking data is useful in each of these resources and tools, it is important to use real-world user information sources. So use at least one of these resources in any situation because you can get valuable information about the user experience of your site pages that is not in controlled automated testing resources.

How can LCP be optimized?

Once you find your site LCP, you can measure it. After measuring the LCP of your site, you will find that the suggested time is a maximum of 2.5 seconds. But what should you do now? After finding your site’s LCP and analyzing its information, you can identify the main issues affecting the LCP. By solving them, start optimizing the LCP benchmark to achieve the optimal loading time of the largest part of your page content. Do. These factors include:

• Slow loading of page components
• Incorrect rendering on the client-side
• Slow server response time
• Existence of rendering blocking codes

But it would help if you did not worry about these issues on your site. There are simple solutions to each of these problems.

Ways to solve the page speed problem to improve LCP

To solve the problem of the slow loading of page components such as images or videos, you can use their optimization methods such as compression, important preloading resources, and running a flexible service. Suppose your site’s rendering is configured incorrectly on the client-side. In that case, you can solve this problem by shrinking large JavaScript files, minimizing unnecessary JavaScript files, and using server-side rendering or pre-rendering.

To solve the problem of slow server response time, you should use the following solutions:

• Optimize your server
• Please pay attention to routing users who are farther away to create a content delivery network (CDN) closer to them.
• Use cache
• Use a server
• Establish fast external connections with rel = preconnect and use verified networks

To solve the problem of having blocker rendering code (such as scripts and instructions), you can perform the following methods:

• Minimize CSS and Java code
• Linearize the original CSS code
• Reduce polyfill
• Remove any unnecessary code

With any of the above solutions, you can make fundamental positive changes to your site to optimize LCP. Finally, by reading this article, we hope that you will have useful information about benchmarking, its importance for optimizing site pages, finding LCP, and troubleshooting your site to improve LCP.

Although LCP is an important measure of improving a site’s page rank in Google, optimizing pages to improve it is not a difficult task. So now, using the resources introduced in this article, start finding the LCP of your site and seek to improve it with the solutions provided.