Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the biggest thing in the viewport has drawn. Google calls under 2.5 s good and over 4 s poor.

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Largest Contentful Paint marks the moment the biggest image or text block in the first screen finishes rendering. For a visitor, it is the point where the page looks loaded. It is one of Google's three Core Web Vitals and part of the page experience signals used in search.

Thresholds

SiteScan colours LCP by Google's own limits: 2.5 s or less is good, up to 4 s needs improvement, and anything slower is poor. The value appears twice: in the lab rows from the Lighthouse run on the home page, and — when the site has enough traffic — in the real-user rows, where it is the 75th percentile of visits over the last 28 days.

The usual culprits:

• A slow server response (see TTFB in the same table) — everything else waits for it.
• A hero image that is too large, in an old format, or discovered late because it is set in CSS or lazy-loaded.
• Render-blocking stylesheets and scripts in the <head>, and web fonts that hold back text.

How to improve it

Serve the hero image in AVIF or WebP at the size it is displayed, never put loading="lazy" on it, and give it fetchpriority="high" or a <link rel="preload">. Inline the critical CSS, defer the rest of the scripts, and cache static files at the edge. More in Core Web Vitals and image optimisation.