Your site’s ability to perform well has a significant effect on its ranking in search engines. Google uses several metrics to measure the quality of your site—including the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in WordPress.
So, if you want your website to run smoothly and rank higher in search engine results pages, there are things you can do that will make all the difference. By identifying the heaviest element on your page, for example, it becomes much easier to optimize your content so that it performs better and speeds up your site.
In this post, we’ll look at how to enhance your website LCP. Then we'll share five strategies that will help you improve this metric when using WordPress as an underlying platform. Let's get started!
How To Measure Largest Contentful Paint in WordPress?
In 2020, Google unraveled the Core Web Vitals project. The popular search engine uses this set of metrics to measure the performance and quality factors of your site; one metric is called Largest Contentful Paint, which measures how long it takes for a page to fully load its largest item (usually an image).
In most cases, this content is a prominent visual element - like the hero image. Also, you can use WordPress support to learn more about it.
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to measure your LCP score. This tool gathers the real-life performance data that comes from different users and provides you with a breakdown of each score:
Beyond just giving you the time, this tool also identifies what element of your site Google uses to determine the Largest Contentful Paint in the Diagnostics section lower down the page:
Most other tools can now also test for Largest ContentFul Paint, which gives you a little more flexibility when testing from different locations, devices, and connection speeds. Per Google, ideal LCP score should be 2.5 seconds or less.
If the largest element on your pages takes longer to load- it could affect user experience (UX) negatively. Poor UX may contribute to a higher bounce rate; Therefore, optimizing your site to improve largest ContentFul paint scores in WordPress is important.
5 Things To Improve Your Largest Contentful Paint Score In WordPress
As we have learned, your LCP plays a crucial role in how well your site performs. So without further ado, here are five ways you can use to increase that number and make your website load faster!
1.Optimized Images
As we discussed before, LCP tracks how long it takes your website to render the largest element on the page. Image files are often the heaviest ones, so optimizing these can have a large impact on performance. According to your PageSpeed Insights report, you should resize and optimize your photos in order to do this.
It optimizes all of your WordPress images automatically and ensures that they're resized for various devices. And while maintaining high-quality levels - using techniques like compression and WebP formats.
It also serves these images through CDNs so that when someone visits your site. Instead of loading from your server location - optimized graphics are loaded from the nearest network connection point. It improves performance significantly.
By optimizing and compressing these resources ahead of time - you can dramatically reduce load times. Smaller file sizes mean quicker downloads, which means improved performance scores!
2.Eliminate render-blocking resources
Render-blocking resources are assets that slow down the loading of web pages. When present, they make a user wait until they load before the page can finish loading, which slows down your LCP score. To fix this loading issue, simply remove any offending renders or force them to run last instead of first.
Luckily, these steps are easier than they sound—you can even use WordPress plugins like WP Rocket to take care of everything for you!
This tool removes any blocking CSS and JavaScript from your website, so users can view the content sooner. To optimize file delivery to make it work even faster, use these WP Rocket optimization settings:
Under CSS Files -> Optimize CSS Delivery -> Remove Unused CSS
Under JavaScript Files -> Load JS Deferred -> Delay JavaScript Execution.
3.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). This is a network of servers that are spread across multiple locations. If you leverage the full potential of a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Then your visitors will be served cached copies of your content from the server closest to them. It means they can load pages faster, or visit more pages before having to wait for each one to load.
This way, your site will run faster that users cherish. Moreover, a CDN decreases the load on the server you are using. This can further boost your site speed. If you’re using Optimole, you’re already benefiting from a CDN to load your images. But you might also want to use one for your other static files as well if you want an even higher LCP score.
If optimizing Web performance isn't enough, this 3-Step Guide provides practical advice on how businesses can make money off Web optimization efforts.
4.Delete Unused Plugins
Your LCP score can be affected by the plugins you are infusing on your WordPress site. Heavyweight software can reduce your site speed, especially if these tools utilize a lot of CSS or JavaScript codes. More specifically, you’ll need to delete tools who have unused JS and CSS codes.
Having so many unused scripts also add unnecessary data transfer to your website. By doing so, you can slow down your content rendering. The PageSpeed Insight report provides the URLs of problematic scripts and you can identify heavy plugins.
However, having too many tools on your site can lead to problems in removing them. Also, it will be a time-consuming task. Therefore, instead, start by deleting any unwanted or unneeded plugins from your site first before looking for lighter replacements.
5. Increase Your Server Response Time
The server response time is also known as the time to first byte (TTFB). This is the amount of time it takes for a user’s browser to receive the first byte of content on your page. Slow server response times will cause page loading delays, which affects your LCP score.
If you’ve removed unused plugins and scripts from your site but you’re still getting a low LCP score, then there could be an issue with your servers. So perhaps it would be time to upgrade to a better hosting plan. With shared hosting - especially when starting out this package has been proven helpful.
Because! It's affordable and easy to use without compromising quality or performance. Moreover, it makes it easy to improve largest Contentful Paint Score in WordPress for better outcomes.
Wrapping Up
As your site starts gaining more and more traffic, you may want to consider upgrading to a higher-tier plan. We recommend going with managed hosting. With this package, your web host will handle all optimization tasks necessary so that your website runs without any issues.
For those who are just starting out, you may also want to opt for lower-tier VPS or dedicated hosting plans; while these services can be quite expensive. They provide greater server resources which could make the difference between having an accessible site and losing visitors entirely.
Also, you can hire WordPress developers with ease and enhance your website performance.
Frequently Asked Questions :
Q1.Is WordPress similar to Contentful?
Contentful is an API-first content management system that empowers teams to publish content on any digital channel. Known as a headless CMS solution, Contentful is nothing like a monolithic CMS platform such as WordPress.
Q2.Is Contentful better than WordPress?
In contrast to Contentful, WordPress is much cheaper. It's easy to set up a WordPress account with an inexpensive monthly subscription plan. With flexible pricing options (as low as $4 per month), WordPress outperforms Contentful.
Q3.What is a good LCP score?
To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to have a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less. A good threshold to measure this against is the 75th percentile of page loads for both mobile and desktop devices.
Q4.What is a good LCP score?
To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to have an Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less. A good threshold to measure this against is the 75th percentile of page loads for both mobile and desktop devices.
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