You down with LCP?

The tribe has spoken. LCP is in.

We’ve seen a clear shift in the past 12 months. Core Web Vitals have grown up right before our eyes, and specifically, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) has become the chosen one, for measuring page load.

For years (decades?) we waffled on how to measure page load. Inconsistency was the norm:

Dom complete 

                               time to interactive 

                                                                      onLoad 

Then, Google delivered us a gift by rolling out CWVs in August 2021.

Naturally, when Google talks - and teased SEO implications based on poor page performance, of which CWVs are a component - we listened. LCP and CLS gave us some clear measures to align on for page speed, and user experience (FID, first input delay, proved to be an easier bar to clear for most).

Further credit to Google for not simply setting and forgetting CWVs, too. INP (interaction to Next Paint) is soon (12 March 2024) to become a card carrying official CWV, and provides another measure of how a site responds to visitor engagement.

It has taken a couple of years, but we’ve slowly aligned on CWVs as key performance measures. Maybe it is their convenient traffic light categorization. Or, maybe it is thanks to other industry heavyweights embedding more CWV into reporting, like Shopify recently announced in their Winter release.

→ back to LCP. If this is our page load metric, let’s get to know it. And, more importantly, where we are delaying that LCP. Third party technologies play a role here - and have a real impact on LCP. How much? It depends of course - but the category of technology plays a big role.

Even within a tech category, impact varies – those ‘heavier’ tech can have a more significant impact on LCP - heavy tech in most categories delay LCP by more than 100ms - consuming roughly 4% of LCP time.

Get to know LCP - and what is standing in the way of a faster page load.