By Katrina Kirsch

If you could improve your website’s performance by 10%, would you?

Site performance scoring is a complex web of metrics, and First Contentful Paint (FCP) is just one factor Google considers when evaluating page load speed. Responsible for 10% of a website’s overall performance score, FCP plays an important role in creating a positive user experience for visitors.

A site’s First Contentful Paint (FCP) is the total time it takes a page to load from the moment the request is sent to the point that any content is rendered on the screen.

The higher the FCP score, the slower the content loads. When visitors think a page takes too long to load, it can be a major red flag. In a study by Top Designs Firms, 42% of people said they would leave a poorly functioning website.

But a low FCP score shows that the page is loading quickly, which means content will be delivered sooner. And fast-loading content is one way to keep visitors scrolling your site. In fact, Deloitte found that a 0.1-second improvement in load time increased conversions by 8.4% for retail sites and 10.1% for travel sites.

When a millisecond makes a difference, it’s best to do whatever you can to improve your site speed. So let’s take a look at how to lower FCP to make your site as fast and user-friendly as possible.

What is First Contentful Paint?

First Contentful Paint (FCP) is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the first content on a website, whether it’s images, text, logos, background graphics, or non-white elements. FCP evaluates how users experience a website’s page load speed by measuring what people actually perceive, rather than the results of a speed test tool.

In the timeline below, you can see FCP play out in the second frame when the first text and image elements appear on the screen.

Image Source

First Contentful Paint is one of six metrics tracked in the Google Lighthouse Performance report, along with Time to Interactive, Speed Index, Total Blocking Time, Largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. Each metric measures an aspect of page load speed.

Image Source

First Contentful Paint is an important metric for judging the page load timeline because it marks the point where a user can see that something is happening on the screen. Without this reassurance, a user might leave the page to browse a faster website.

First Contentful Paint differs from the Core Web Vitals Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) because LCP measures the time it takes for the largest element on a website to become visible. On the other hand, FCP measures the first element to load, which isn’t necessarily the largest element.

A quick LCP helps assure people that the main content is useful to them. But a fast FCP reassures people that something is …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron