Fixing one of the most familiar Google PageSpeed Insights warnings, the “Largest Contentful Paint Element” can significantly improve the website’s PageSpeed performance and enhance the user experience. 

But what is the Largest Contentful Paint element and how does it impact a website’s PageSpeed performance?

Here, we will discuss every minor detail of the warning “Largest Contentful Paint Element”, including what the warning is, the importance of fixing this and how to mitigate this Google PageSpeed insights warning “Largest Contentful Paint Element.” 

Fixing the Google PageSpeed warning “Largest Contentful Paint Element” can be possible in two ways. If you love to experiment with coding, you can manually fix this. Otherwise, the best option is to install RabbitLoader for a non-coding solution. 

What Is The Largest Contentful Paint?

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of the pillars of Core Web Vital metrics developed by Google, used to quantify the initial page loading time of a website. This LCP accounts for 25% weightage of the overall Page Speed performance. 

Let’s understand the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in a simple way. This Core Web Vital metric, LCP measures the time between a user’s visit to a website and the time when the largest element can be rendered on the user’s browser. 

Using an unoptimized Largest Contentful Paint Element can be the reason behind the Google PageSpeed warning “Largest Contentful Paint element”. LCP optimization can mitigate this Google PSI warning. 

What Is The Largest Contentful Paint Element?

Now a common question that may pop up in your mind that what is the Largest Contentful Paint element. But after reading this section, your doubts will be cleared.

A hero image is often considered an LCP element. Apart from the hero image, there are some website resources such as a background image, video, text block, or animation that are considered an LCP candidate. Additionally, a block-level or largest content such as a heading, subheadings, <ul>, or any table in a web page can be considered the Largest Contentful Paint Element. 

How To Measure The Largest Contentful Paint Time

Several PageSpeed analyzing tools, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, Google Lighthouse, Chrome devtools and others, are available to measure the overall PageSpeed performance as well as the performance of Core Web Vitals such as Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Interaction to Next Paint and other performance metrics. 

After entering the URL in Google PageSpeed Insight and clicking the analyze button, you can see the overall score as well as the core web vitals performance. Google also sets three values in order to categorize the performance. 

An LCP time below 2.5 seconds is considered good performance, whereas an LCP time between 2.5 seconds and 4.0 seconds is categorized as average performance. Google suggests optimizing the LCP performance to pass the core web vitals assessment. Finally, if the LCP time exceeds 4.0 seconds, Google considers this a poor Largest Contentful Paint score. 

The Importance Of Fixing The Google PSI Warnings: Largest Contentful Paint Element

In Google PageSpeed Insights, you can also see how an unoptimized Largest Contentful Paint element can harm a website’s overall page speed performance. 

Here, you can see, that an unoptimized Largest Contentful paint element increased the timing of the Time To First Byte (TTFB) and render delay which harmed the performance of the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), affecting the overall PageSpeed performance. 

Hence, fixing this Google PageSpeed insights warning “largest contentful paint element” can significantly improve the LCP performance. Let’s see the importance of optimizing the LCP performance which includes:

• Improving the overall PageSpeed score
• Passing the core web vitals assessment in Google PageSpeed Insights 
• Enhancing user experience
• Improve the Google rankings 

Improve the overall PageSpeed performance

Google discovered three factors, such as initial loading time, visual stability, and user responsiveness, to decide a website’s overall PageSpeed performance. An LCP indicates a website’s initial loading time. Thus, optimizing a website’s initial loading can significantly improve overall PageSpeed performance. 

Pass the Core Web Vitals assessment

In order to pass the Core Web Vitals assessment, the six performance metrics such as LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, FID and TTFB need to be in the green zone.  

Hence, LCP optimization can significantly help you pass the Core Web Vitals assessment and help you achieve a good PageSpeed Insights score in Google PSI. 

Enhance user experience

An initial loading time can generate the user’s first impression of your website. Thus, a slow-loading website can typically increase the website’s bounce rate and negatively affect the conversion rate.

According to the Baymard Institute, if a website takes more than three seconds to load its content, almost 40% of users leave that website. Optimizing LCP can improve the user experience, increasing the user’s engagement with the website content and boosting the conversion rate.   

According to a case study by the web.dev website, just a 31% improvement in the LCP performance increased the sales by 8% of Vodafone, the most popular telecommunication company. Thus, optimizing LCP is essential for enhancing the user experience. 

Improve the Google rankings 

As Google added core web vitals as a ranking factor in its ranking algorithm, optimizing LCP performance can significantly help you improve your Google rankings, which can bring you organic traffic and increase the website’s conversion rate. In the case of the Vodafone case study, a 31% LCP performance improvement can lead to an increase in organic traffic by 10 %. 

Largest Contentful Paint Element: How To Mitigate It

At this point, you already know that optimizing the LCP performance can easily mitigate this Google PageSpeed Insights warning, “largest contentful Paint element.” Here, we will mainly focus on manual strategies for optimizing the LCP performance. 

However, if you are looking for a non-coding & effortless solution, you need to install RabbitLoader. 

Let’s explore the 5 effective manual LCP optimization strategies which include:

1. Optimize the image files
2. Defer the off-screen images
3. Minify the resource file
4. Generate the critical CSS file
5. Reduce the unused CSS 

Optimize the image files

While adding eye-catching images can increase the website’s visual appearance, this can be one of the reasons behind the element render delay. Thus, image optimization is essential to optimize LCP performance. 

By converting the images into next-gen format, you can reduce the image file size even without affecting their visual quality. This is known as lossless compression. Several image optimizers are available where you need to convert the images one by one. 

If the website has a lot of images, it can be daunting to manually optimize the images one by one. In such cases, the best solution is to install RabbitLoader and optimize the images, improving the LCP performance.  

Defer the off-screen images

Deferring the off-screen images can improve the LCP performance. In order to defer the off-screen images, you need to implement a lazy loading for those images that are not present in above-the-fold. This optimization strategy is more effective especially when you have a lot of images on your website such as an ecommerce store that has tens of thousands of images. 

For manually implementing lazy loading in the website, you need to add a lazy load attribute in the <img> tag of the HTML file. Let’s see the syntax for implementing lazy load.   

<img loading=”lazy” src=”lazy_load.jpg” alt=”lazy loading image” />

Identifying the off-screen images and adding a lazy load can be time-consuming. However, using RabbitLoader, you can implement lazy loading within a few minutes and improve the LCP performance. 

Minify the resource file

Characters like unnecessary comments, line breaks, and white space increase the resource file size, which can increase your website’s total page file size. In such cases, you need to minify the resource file to improve the initial page load time. 

Minification is a technical method of removing unnecessary characters from the resource file without affecting any functionality. If you want to do this manually, you need to put in a huge effort. However, if you are using RabbitLoader, you don’t need to put in any extra effort to minimize the resource file. Like the other optimization strategies, RabbitLoader will also take care of this.  

Generate the critical CSS file

Without generating critical CSS, improving the LCP performance can be challenging. Generating critical CSS significantly improves the initial loading time by optimizing the CSS file. 

To manually generate the critical CSS file, first, you need to identify the critical CSS (the CSS styles that are required for initial loading) and then create a separate CSS stylesheet and includes those critical CSS. Hence, it requires a lot of technical knowledge. 

Due to its difficulties, most optimization tools overlook this web optimization strategy. RabbitLoader can optimize the CSS style by generating a separate CSS file for the critical CSS. The biggest advantage is that when you use RabbitLoader for PageSpeed optimization purposes, you can generate the critical CSS file without any coding knowledge. 

Reduce the unused CSS 

Unused CSS styles unnecessarily increase the CSS file as well as the total page file size which negatively affects the initial page loading time. Reducing unused can significantly improve the initial loading time (LCP performance). 

In order to reduce the unused CSS in the CSS stylesheets, first, the unused CSS rules (the rules that are not used in the current website design) need to be identified and then removed. It can reduce the CSS file size. While you are manually doing this, you need to be very careful. One small mistake can bane the entire website’s design. 

Hence, you need to install RabbitLoader to reduce the unused CSS from the CSS file (which are render blocking resources), reducing the initial loading time and improving the LCP performance. 

Fix The “Largest Contentful Paint Element” Warning With RabbitLoader 

Fixing one of the most common Google PageSpeed Insights warnings, the “Largest Contentful Paint Element,” or optimizing the LCP performance requires extensive technical knowledge, effort, and time when it’s done manually. But what if you are not from a technical background or have a large-sized website?

Here RabbitLoader will help you with its non-coding solutions. 

When you install RabbitLoader, it will optimize your website’s PageSpeed performance within a few seconds. You don’t need to invest money in the ten different PageSpeed optimization plugins. RabbitLoader implements all essential web optimization strategies to fix the Largest Contentful Paint element which includes:

• Bulk image optimization: Convert all eye-catching images into a next-gen format (WebP & AVIF) where the image size will be reduced without affecting the image quality. 

• Lazy loading implementation: Defer the off-screen images by implementing lazy loading and improving the initial page load time. 

• Minification & Compression: Reduce the resource file size (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) by removing unnecessary characters as well as reducing the code redundancy (code repetition).  

• CSS optimization: speed up the LCP time by reducing the unused CSS and generating critical CSS.

Apart from the above strategies, RabbitLoader also implements web caching (an efficient browser cache & a premium Content Delivery Network), adds link preload in the HTML header to LCP resource, sets fetch priority and many more. 

Thus, if you are also encountering the “Largest Contentful Paint element” warnings in Google PageSpeed Insights, don’t waste your money as well as time on the wrong plugin. Install RabbitLoader and optimize the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) performance, improving the web performance as well.