What Is First Contentful Paint And How To Optimize It To Pass Core Web Vitals?

Google released First Contentful Paint (FCP) to assess a web page’s initial loading time. To improve your website’s FCP performance, you can either implement optimization strategies like using browser & CDN caching, reducing the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript file size, and removing the unused CSS, or you can install the RabbitLoader performance optimization tool on your website if you are looking for an effortless solution.

Although First Contentful Paint is not a core web vitals metric, if you need to improve your user experience and pass the Core Web Vitals, you can’t neglect FCP. 

Let’s discuss what you need to know about FCP and explore helpful strategies for optimizing it to pass the Core Web Vitals and boost your Google PageSpeed Insights score of your website. 

What Is the First Contentful Paint?

First Contentful Paint quantifies the time from when a user visits a web page to when the web page’s first content is displayed on the browser. This content can include any images (including the logo and background images), text, any <svg> elements, or non-white canvas.

FCP is a crucial metric for your user experience & PageSpeed score. When visiting a web page for the first time, if users spot a blank page, they might get confused about whether the website is loading or not. They will likely leave the page or frantically try to reload it.

Difference Between LCP & FCP

As a competent web developer or website owner, it’s essential to understand how the First Contentful Paint (FCP) differs from the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).    

Where First Contentful Paint is used to measure the time it requires to display a web page’s first piece of content, Largest Contentful Paint calculates the time it takes to display the largest element of a web page. This largest element can be a hero image or a text block. 

What Is A Good FCP Time?

According to Google, a website’s FCP time needs to be less than 1.8 seconds to pass the core web vitals assessment. If the FCP score is between 1.8 seconds and 3.0 seconds, Google PageSpeed Insights suggests improving the FCP performance to provide a better user experience.

Finally, if the FCP time exceeds 3.0 seconds, your website fails the core web vitals test. To be in a green zone, you need to optimize your FCP time to pass the PageSpeed test.   

The Importance Of Optimizing FCP

Before diving into the solution, let’s explore the importance of optimizing FCP performance. 

• Lower Bounce Rate = Better User Experience

By optimizing your website’s FCP performance, you can significantly increase your user experience. Since FCP makes the first impression on your website, users would be more likely to engage with a well-functioning website. Which results in a lower bounce rate. 

• Improve The Conversion Rate

The conversion rate determines the percentage of visitors who can successfully finish an action on your website and become a lead or a buyer.  A lower bounce rate is much more likely to increase your conversion rate by engaging the visitors with the website’s content.  

• Better Organic Rankings

Google always prioritizes the user experience. Therefore, optimizing your FCP time can significantly improve your PageSpeed score which is a strong positive signal for your Google organic rankings.

The Most Common Reasons For Poor FCP Performance 

While several factors can negatively impact the First Contentful Paint (FCP). Let’s focus on the most common reasons for poor FCP performance.   

How To Optimize Your Website’s FCP?

Let’s explore the optimization techniques to mitigate each of the above mentioned issues that are impacting the FCP to improve the First Contentful Paint time of your website. 

Use Browser & CDN Caching

Using a browser and CDN caching mechanism can significantly reduce the initial server response time and improve the Time to First Byte (TTFB) performance. 

However, adding a browser cache is not enough for web optimization; you need to set efficient caching policies to provide a better user experience and to make sure you are not serving stale content to your visitors.

Manually implementing the browser cache with an efficient caching policy requires extensive technical knowledge. Read our server static assets with an efficient cache policy blog if you wish to explore more on how to do it yourself.  

If you do not wish to go into the nitty gritty of it & just need the issue to be solved, you can install a performance optimization tool like RabbitLoader to implement the browser cache with an efficient caching policy. 

RabbitLoader also distributes the cacheable content between 300+ edge servers worldwide to reduce the latency.

Reduce The HTML, CSS, And JavaScript File Size

When it comes to FCP optimization, reducing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript file size is one of the most effective strategies to improve the FCP time. There are two ways to reduce these resources’ file size: minification & compression. 

While minification removes unnecessary comments, line breaks, and white space from the resource files, by compressing the method, you can reduce the redundancy of the string variable in the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. 

When you use RabbitLoader, you don’t need to put any extra effort into the minification and compression process, RabbitLoader takes care of it.

Reduce unused CSS

The term Unused CSS indicates CSS rules that are not utilized in the current web page design but consume space in your CSS stylesheets. This unused CSS would unnecessarily increase your website’s page size.

By removing this unused CSS, you can improve the core web vitals performance, especially the FCP and LCP performance. If you want to remove the unused CSS manually without having proper coding knowledge, it can be risky. One mistake can harm the whole web page’s design.

Therefore, using RabbitLoader would be the safest option if you are not versed in CSS  

Optimize Your First Contentful Paint With RabbitLoader

Web optimization requires a lot of effort and technical knowledge. Thus, many web developers end up using a lot of different WordPress plugins to improve PageSpeed performance. However, using ten different plugins usually harms PageSpeed performance as these plugins conflict with each other.

When you use RabbitLoader, it will implement all the optimization techniques needed to pass the core web vitals and improve your PageSpeed score. Therefore, you don’t need to use other performance optimization plugins, avoiding plugin conflicts and improving PageSpeed performance. 

If you want to seriously improve your website’s PageSpeed performance to provide a seamless user experience, you must install RabbitLoader to improve the First Contentful Paint performance along with the other performance metrics and boost your PageSpeed performance.