The overall performance of your site can significantly affect your search engine rankings. Google uses several metrics to measure the quality of your site, including the 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 skills 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. We will then share five strategies that can help you improve the Largest Contentful Paint score in WordPress.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents hide
How to measure Largest Contentful Paint
Five ways to improve the largest contentful paint in WordPress.
- Optimize your images
- Eliminate resources that block rendering
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
- Remove unused plugins
- Reduce the response time of your server
Improve your LCP in WordPress today
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 measures the time it takes for a page to fully load the largest element on the screen. In most cases, this content is a prominent visual element such as a slider or hero.
You can measure your LCP score using Google’s PageSpeed Insights . This tool collects dreal performance data from different users and provides a breakdown of each score:
In addition to giving you the times, 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
Most other speed testing tools can now also test the largest contentful paint, and this 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 the largest contentful paint in WordPress
As we have seen, your LCP score plays a key role in the overall performance of your site. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five effective ways to improve this score and speed up the loading of your website!
1.Optimize your images
2.Eliminate resources that block rendering
3.Use a content delivery network (CDN)
4.Remove unused plugins
5.Reduce your server’s response time
- Optimize your images.
As mentioned earlier, LCP measures the time it takes for a website to render the largest element on the page. Media files such as images and videos tend to be the heaviest files.
To solve this problem, it is essential to optimize your images . In fact, this method is recommended in your PageSpeed Insights report
To resize your images and optimize them with tactics such as compression and webP format , you can use an image optimization tool such as Optimole :
This plugin optimizes your WordPress images in real time and makes sure each graphic element is resized correctly for different devices. It also compresses your photos without compromising their quality.
In addition, Optimole will serve your images through a content delivery network (CDN). This way, when someone visits your website, the optimized graphics will be loaded from the nearest network location instead of from your WordPress site’s server, reducing download speed.
By resizing and compressing your images, you can greatly increase the speed of your site. Smaller files will load faster, which, in turn, will improve your LCP score.
- Eliminate resources that block rendering
Resources that block rendering are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that force browsers to delay rendering content on your site. Therefore, these elements increase page load times, which results in a poor LCP score.
You can solve this loading problem by removing the elements that block rendering or by forcing their execution after everything else has loaded. Fortunately, this process is simpler than it sounds.
In fact, you can use a plugin such as WP Rocket , which will do all the work for you:
This tool will automatically remove all CSS and JavaScript that blocks the display on your website. As such, the plugin will help minimize any lag in content rendering, resulting in faster loading times for users of your site.
If you are using WP Rocket, the most useful settings to enable are in the File Optimization tab .
Under CSS Files , enable the following:
- Optimize CSS Publishing > Remove Unused CSS.
Under JavaScript Files , enable the following: - Load deferred JS
Delay the execution of JavaScript
- Use a content delivery network (CDN).
Another effective way to improve the Largest Contentful Paint score in WordPress is to use a content delivery network (CDN), a network of servers distributed in different locations.
When you use a CDN, your visitors will be provided with cached copies of your content from the server geographically closest to them. In this way, your site will load faster for your users.
In addition, a CDN minimizes the load on your hosting server further increasing the speed of your site.
If you are using Optimole, you are already benefiting from a CDN to upload your images. But you may also want to use a CDN for your other static files and to further improve your Largest Contentful Paint score.
If you want to set up a hassle-free CDN, you can take a look at RocketCDN. It is directly integrated into WP Rocket:
This tool automatically applies optimal configuration settings to improve the performance of your site. The CDN is powered by StackPath , which has over 45 edge locations around the world.
A CDN can be a good investment if your site targets an international audience. It makes sure that your content loads quickly for all users, regardless of their location. This configuration can significantly improve your LCP score.
- Remove unused plugins.
Your LCP score can also be affected by the plugins you use on your WordPress site. Heavy software can slow down your site, especially if these tools use a lot of CSS or JavaScript.
PageSpeed Insights recommends removing all plugins that add volume to your pages:
More specifically, you will need to eliminate all tools that load unused CSS and JavaScript. Having many unused scripts on your site adds unnecessary data transfer. Thus, these processes slow down content rendering.
The PageSpeed Insight report provides you with the URLs of problematic scripts to help you identify those heavy plugins. However, if you have a large number of tools on your site, removing them can still take a long time.
Therefore, you might start by removing any unused or unnecessary plugins from your site. You can then try to find lighter alternatives.
- Reduce your server’s response time.
Server response time, also known as time to first byte (TTFB), is the time it takes for a user’s browser to receive the first byte of content from your page. Slow server response times will result in delays in page loading, which will affect your LCP score.
As noted in PageSpeed Insights, plugins, themes, and hosting service can affect server response times:
If you have removed unused plugins and scripts from your site and are still getting a poor LCP score, the problem may be your server. Therefore, it may be time to upgrade to a better hosting plan.
Shared hosting is often the best solution for new websites because it is affordable. However, with this package, you share a server with many other website owners. Therefore, if the server receives a large number of requests at once, it can slow down response times.
As your site grows and you begin to receive more traffic, it is worth considering upgrading to a more advanced plan. We recommend opting for managed WordPress hosting . With this solution, your web host will handle all the optimization tasks necessary to keep your website running smoothly.
You might also consider a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated hosting . Although these services can be a bit expensive, you will get more server resources. In addition, the provider will configure the server according to your specific needs and requirements. Therefore, it will be better equipped to handle large amounts of traffic and efficiently deliver your content.
Enhance your LCP in WordPress today
The user experience (UX) and loading time of your site can affect your visibility in search results. Therefore, it is critical to improve the overall performance of your site, including your LCP score.
In this post, we reviewed five effective ways to improve the largest contentful paint score in WordPress:
1.Optimize your images, using a compression tool.
2.Eliminate resources that block rendering with a plugin
3.Use a content delivery network (CDN)
4.Remove unused plugins from your site.
5.Reduce your server’s response time by upgrading to a more powerful hosting plan.