A slow website doesn’t just frustrate visitors, it costs you customers. If your pages take too long to load, Google notices, your bounce rate climbs, and the people you worked hard to attract leave before they even see what you offer. One of the biggest metrics Google uses to measure loading performance is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and if yours is lagging, your rankings and conversions are taking the hit. Understanding how to improve Largest Contentful Paint is one of the most practical things you can do to make your site faster and more competitive.
At Avatar Website Design, we build and optimize websites for small businesses every day. We see firsthand how poor LCP scores hold businesses back, and how much of a difference the right fixes make. The good news is that most LCP problems come down to a handful of common, fixable issues like oversized images, slow servers, and render-blocking resources.
This guide walks you through the process step by step. You’ll learn exactly what LCP measures, how to diagnose your score, and which optimizations to prioritize so your site loads fast for every visitor on every device. No guesswork, no fluff, just the fixes that actually move the needle.
What LCP is and what good looks like
Largest Contentful Paint measures the time from when a user first requests your page to when the largest visible element in their viewport finishes rendering. That element is almost always a hero image, a large heading, or a video poster frame sitting above the fold. Google treats this moment as the point when the page feels loaded, which is why LCP carries significant weight in Core Web Vitals scoring and directly influences how your site ranks in search results.
A strong LCP score signals to both users and search engines that your page delivers content quickly and without friction.
What counts as an LCP element
Not every element on your page qualifies for the LCP measurement. Google’s algorithm evaluates a specific set of element types and picks the one with the largest rendered area visible in the viewport at load time. Knowing which elements qualify helps you focus your efforts instead of optimizing things that have no impact on the score.
The qualifying element types include:
<img>elements<image>elements inside an SVG<video>elements, measured by the poster image- Elements using a CSS background image loaded via
url() - Block-level text containers such as
<p>,<h1>, and<div>
If a larger element appears later during the loading sequence, the browser updates the LCP timestamp to reflect that newer element. This means late-loading hero images frequently drive poor LCP scores even when everything else on the page loads quickly.
LCP score thresholds
Google divides LCP performance into three bands. Knowing where your site currently sits tells you how urgent your optimization work is and gives you a concrete target to aim for. This is the starting point for anyone working through how to improve Largest Contentful Paint on their site.
| LCP Score | Rating |
|---|---|
| 2.5 seconds or under | Good |
| 2.5 to 4.0 seconds | Needs Improvement |
| Above 4.0 seconds | Poor |
Your target is to reach 2.5 seconds or under for at least 75% of real-world page loads. Google measures this using field data from the Chrome User Experience Report, not just lab simulations. Always check your field data alongside tool-based scores, because real user conditions like slow mobile networks regularly expose problems that lab tests miss entirely.
Step 1. Find your LCP element and the bottleneck
Before you can fix anything, you need to know exactly which element is triggering your LCP score and where the delay is coming from. Guessing wastes time. Fortunately, you can pinpoint the problem in a few minutes using tools you already have access to, with no paid software required.
Use Chrome DevTools to identify your LCP element
Open Chrome DevTools by pressing F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I (Cmd+Option+I on Mac), then navigate to the Performance tab. Click the record button, reload the page, and stop the recording. Scroll down to the Timings row in the flame chart and look for the LCP marker. Clicking it highlights the exact element responsible for your score directly in the DOM. You can also install the Chrome Web Vitals extension to get a quick visual overlay showing the LCP element on each page load without running a full trace.
Knowing the specific element, whether it is an image, a heading, or a background, tells you exactly which fix to apply first.
Read the waterfall to find where time is lost
Once you know the LCP element, check where the delay originates in the loading sequence. Google breaks LCP time into four sub-parts:
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): how long the server takes to respond
- Resource load delay: time between TTFB and when the browser starts fetching the LCP resource
- Resource load time: how long the LCP resource itself takes to download
- Element render delay: time between the resource finishing and the element painting on screen
Use PageSpeed Insights to pull both field and lab data for your URL. Each sub-part points to a different category of fix, so identifying the largest one tells you exactly where to focus your effort as you work through how to improve Largest Contentful Paint.
Step 2. Cut TTFB and fix server-side delays
If your TTFB is the largest sub-part in your LCP breakdown, server response time is the bottleneck and fixing it delivers the biggest gains. TTFB measures how long your server takes to send the first byte of the HTML document back to the browser. Every millisecond spent waiting on the server pushes your LCP score further into the red before the browser has even started loading a single resource.
Google recommends a TTFB of 800 milliseconds or under to stay on track for a good LCP score.
Enable caching and use a CDN
Serving your pages from a content delivery network (CDN) cuts delivery time by routing each visitor to a server physically close to their location. Pair that with aggressive HTTP caching headers so browsers and CDN edge nodes store your HTML, images, and static assets instead of re-fetching them on every visit. Add the following directive to your server configuration or .htaccess file:
Cache-Control: max-age=31536000, immutable
Use shorter cache durations for HTML pages and longer values for versioned static assets like images and scripts to balance freshness with performance.
Upgrade your hosting if response times stay high
Shared hosting plans frequently struggle under real traffic because server resources are split across hundreds of accounts. If your TTFB consistently exceeds 600 milliseconds in PageSpeed Insights, moving to a managed or VPS hosting tier will improve how to improve Largest Contentful Paint faster than any front-end fix. Check your baseline response time directly:
curl -o /dev/null -s -w "TTFB: %{time_starttransfer}\n" https://yourdomain.com
A result above 600ms signals that your hosting environment needs attention before you touch anything else on the front end.
Step 3. Start the LCP resource earlier
Even with a fast server, your browser might not start fetching the LCP resource until well into the loading sequence. This delay, called resource load delay, happens when the browser cannot discover your LCP image or font early enough in the HTML. Closing this gap is one of the most direct ways to improve how to improve largest contentful paint scores without touching your server setup at all.
Preload the LCP resource
Adding a <link rel="preload"> tag to your HTML <head> tells the browser to fetch the LCP resource at the highest priority, before it finishes parsing the rest of the document. For a hero image, your preload tag looks like this:
<link rel="preload" as="image" href="/images/hero.webp" fetchpriority="high">
The fetchpriority="high" attribute signals to the browser that this resource is critical and should jump ahead of other fetches. If your LCP element uses a responsive srcset, match the preload to the exact file the browser loads for the most common viewport size. Preloading the wrong file wastes bandwidth and delivers no LCP benefit.
Preloading the right resource at the right priority is often the single fastest fix for high resource load delay.
Remove lazy loading from the LCP element
Lazy loading works well for offscreen images, but it actively delays any above-the-fold image carrying the loading="lazy" attribute. If your LCP element has that attribute, remove it immediately. Set loading="eager" or leave the attribute off entirely:
<img src="/images/hero.webp" alt="Hero" loading="eager" fetchpriority="high">
Your above-the-fold images should always load eagerly so the browser starts fetching them the moment it encounters the tag in the HTML.
Step 4. Reduce LCP resource size and render time
Once your server is fast and your browser starts fetching the LCP resource early, the next variable is how large that resource is and how quickly it renders. A bloated image file eats up bandwidth and drags out the resource load time sub-part of your LCP score. Cutting file size without visible quality loss is one of the most direct ways to improve how to improve largest contentful paint across every connection speed, including mobile networks.
Compress images and switch to modern formats
Most hero images shipped as JPEG or PNG are significantly larger than they need to be. Converting to WebP cuts file sizes by roughly 25 to 35 percent compared to JPEG at equivalent visual quality, and AVIF pushes savings even further, often reaching 50 percent. Use a <picture> element to serve modern formats with a legacy fallback:
<picture>
<source srcset="/images/hero.avif" type="image/avif">
<source srcset="/images/hero.webp" type="image/webp">
<img src="/images/hero.jpg" alt="Hero image" loading="eager" fetchpriority="high">
</picture>
Always include a JPEG or PNG fallback so older browsers still render the image correctly without breaking the layout.
Size images to match display dimensions
Serving a 3000-pixel-wide image in a container that displays at 800 pixels wastes bandwidth and adds unnecessary render time. Check the rendered size versus the intrinsic size in Chrome DevTools under the Elements panel, then export images at 1x and 2x the display size for standard and high-density screens. Use srcset with width descriptors so the browser picks the right file automatically:
<img
src="/images/hero-800.webp"
srcset="/images/hero-800.webp 800w, /images/hero-1600.webp 1600w"
sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px"
alt="Hero image"
loading="eager"
fetchpriority="high"
>
Finalizing Your LCP Optimization Strategy
You now have a clear, repeatable process for how to improve Largest Contentful Paint from start to finish. Start by identifying your LCP element and pinpointing the largest sub-part in your loading sequence. Fix your server response time first if TTFB is the culprit, then move to preloading and prioritizing your LCP resource, and finally cut image file size using modern formats like WebP or AVIF. Work through each step in order rather than attacking everything at once, and measure your PageSpeed Insights score after each change so you know exactly what moved the needle.
These fixes compound quickly. A faster LCP score means more visitors stay on your page, more of them convert, and Google rewards your site with stronger rankings over time. If you want a professionally built, performance-optimized website without handling all of this yourself, Avatar Website Design builds fast, mobile-ready sites for small businesses ready to grow online.