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What is Largest Contentful Paint?
Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP, is the moment the biggest visible element in the browser window finishes rendering. On most business sites that element is the hero image or the headline. Google treats 2.5 seconds or less as good, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits.
What usually causes a bad score
Four things account for most of it. An enormous unoptimised hero image. A web font that blocks text from painting until it downloads. A slow first response from the server or the content platform. And third-party scripts, especially chat widgets, tracking pixels, and review carousels, loading before the page has drawn anything.
What actually fixes it
Compress and correctly size the hero image, and serve it in a modern format. Preload that one image so the browser fetches it early instead of discovering it late. Let text render in a fallback font while the real one loads. Defer every third-party script that is not needed for the first screen.
Those four changes fix the majority of failing pages without touching the design.
Why the 75th percentile matters
Google does not use the average. It uses the score that three quarters of visits beat, which means a site is judged on its slower visitors rather than its fastest. A page that is instant on office broadband and sluggish on a phone in a basement is scored closer to the basement.
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Where this applies
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