If your website load speed is slow and struggling to rank on google, or showing poor Core Web Vitals scores in Google PageSpeed Insights, then your FCP (First Contentful Paint) and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) are likely the real reasons behind it.
FCP and LCP are two metrics of the most powerful ranking signals Google uses today. When these metrics are poor, your website feels slow, loads late visuals, frustrates users, and drops rankings. The good news? Fixing FCP and LCP is easier than most people think—if you know the right optimization techniques.
This comprehensive guide will explain how to fix FCP, how to improve LCP, and the best practices to resolve Core Web Vitals issues in 2025, whether your website is built on WordPress or a custom platform.
What Is FCP (First Contentful Paint)?
FCP is the time it takes for the browser to render the first visible element such as text, logo, or header. It determines how quickly a user sees something meaningful on the screen. A slow FCP results in a blank page for several seconds, increasing bounce rate and harming SEO. The main causes include heavy JavaScript, render-blocking CSS, unoptimized fonts, and poor server response. Improving FCP boosts initial user experience and search ranking performance.
Your website getting low FCP this means you should beat these key points:
- FCP should be under 1.8 seconds
- Affects first visual experience
- Impacted by CSS, JS, and fonts
- Slow hosting increases FCP
- Critical for better user engagement
What Is LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)?
LCP measures how long it takes for the largest visible element—usually hero images, banners, or headings—to fully load. Google uses LCP as a major ranking signal to measure real user experience. A slow LCP is caused by heavy images, slow hosting, or render-blocking resources. The ideal LCP threshold is under 2.5 seconds. Optimizing your LCP improves page load quality, rankings, and user retention. LCP is especially important for WordPress websites with large hero sections.
If you don’t know what is the major factor of LCP here is the major key points:
- LCP is a primary Core Web Vital
- Should load in under 2.5 seconds
- Hero images commonly cause delays
- Affects ranking and UX
- Requires optimized images + fast hosting
How to resolve FCP and LCP issues?
You will find practical and effective tips here to fix FCP and LCP issues on your website. By following each step carefully, you can easily turn your Core Web Vitals from red to green signal, and significantly improve your overall SEO rankings.
Here is the tips to fix FCP and LCP issues by using Google PageInsights:-
Use compress version of images on your website
If you are not using the compression version of images in your website it means you are loosing your visitors. Images are the best part of every website they make the website more impressive and help showcase your brand awareness to our visitors.
We often ignore image compression and upload high-resolution files, which are usually very heavy data files. This small mistake increases your website’s FCP and LCP time, and giving a bad first impression to visitors. When a website loads on smaller devices, heavy images delay the visual appearance and negatively impact the overall user experience.
Here is why you must prioritize image compression:
- Accelerated Page Load Speed: High-resolution images are heavy data files. By compressing them, you can reduce file sizes by 50% to 80% without a noticeable reduction in visual quality. This ensures your website loads instantly, keeping impatient visitors from hitting the “back” button.
- Boosted SEO Rankings: Search engines like Google explicitly prioritize fast-loading websites. When you Optimize Images in HTML for SEO, you directly improve your Core Web Vitals especially the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). These optimized images help search algorithms understand that your site delivers a faster, more reliable, and superior user experience, which ultimately boosts your ranking potential.
- Enhanced Mobile Experience: A significant portion of web traffic comes from mobile devices often relying on cellular data. Compressed images consume less bandwidth, ensuring that users on 4G or 5G networks can access your content quickly without draining their data caps.
- Reduced Server Load: Smaller file sizes mean your server uses less bandwidth to deliver your site to visitors. This can lower your hosting costs and prevent site crashes during unexpected traffic spikes.
- Next-Gen Formatting: Modern compression goes beyond resizing. Adopting next-gen formats like WebP or AVIF allows you to serve high-quality images with transparency at a fraction of the size of traditional JPEGs or PNGs.
Fix Render-Blocking Resources CSS to Fix FCP and LCP
When a browser loads a website, its primary goal is to paint pixels on the screen. However, CSS is treated as a render-blocking resource by default. This means the browser strictly pauses the display of any content until it has fully downloaded and parsed your CSS files.
If you used uncompressed version of CSS code or files in your HTML code it make your webpage too heavy. Critical, inline and uncompressed CSS together increase website’s loading time that means is not a healthy website. These are some mistakes of CSS that impact on the Core Web Vitals score.
Here is the step to fix render-blocking resources
- Inline critical CSS
- Preload non-critical CSS
- Compress or minify CSS files
- Remove Unused CSS
If you don’t know how to eliminate render-blocking resources CSS click on the below image
Fix Render-Blocking Resources JS(JavaScript) to Fix FCP and LCP
Do you know when a website loads in a device no matter it is loading on mobile or desktop the browser or Google’s bot read the webpage code line by line. Browser read the HTML code, CSS, JS(JavaScript) and also third party URLs for displaying the website on the user display. All functions are necessary to execute before the load full website. There is some code which we have placed in the <head> section on the webpage will delay the rendering time of browser.
Most of the time JavaScript code plays the major role to effect Core Web vitals score and impact your SEO ranking. A uncompressed JS code and placement of large JS libraries in the <head> section have increase the loading time.
You can reduce total JS execution time by fixing render-blocking and improve Core Web Vitals score. Here are some steps to Fix Render Blocking Resources JavaScript:
- Remove All JS code from the <head> section and place before closing </body> tag
- Update your old JavaScript library with new
- Use defer attribute with <script> tag
- Compress JS code or external files
Click to read full article: how to render blocking resources in WordPress without plugin
Reduce TTFB (Server Response Time) for Better Core Web Vitals Score
TTFB is an abbreviation for the time it takes for your server to start delivering data. When TTFB is high, the entire process of FCP and LCP gets delayed. You can make the TTFB better by purchasing a faster hosting service, turning on cache, making your database efficient, and using a CDN. The TTFB should be less than 200ms. With a speedy server, heavy pages and WordPress sites will be loaded fast, thus, the whole process will be quick. The task of lowering TTFB ranks high among all the acts that can significantly improve Core Web Vitals.
Key Points:
- Aim for < 200ms TTFB
- Use fast hosting (LiteSpeed)
- Enable full-page caching
- Reduce database requests
- CDN improves global speed
Optimize Fonts for Faster Rendering
Fonts often block the browser from displaying text, slowing FCP. Preload your main fonts, use font-display: swap, and avoid loading unnecessary font weights. Host Google Fonts locally to reduce network delays. Minimizing font blocking helps browsers paint text faster, improving user experience and reducing early load delays.
Key Points:
- Preload important fonts
- Use font-display: swap
- Avoid loading 5–6 weights
- Host fonts locally
- Reduces rendering delays
Example:
@font-face {
font-family: ‘MyFont’;
src: url(‘MyFont.woff2’) format(‘woff2’);
font-weight: 400;
font-style: normal;
font-display: swap;
}
Importing Fonts (Recommended Way)
<link rel=”preconnect” href=”https://fonts.googleapis.com”>
<link rel=”preconnect” href=”https://fonts.gstatic.com” crossorigin>
<link href=”https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Poppins:wght@400;600&display=swap” rel=”stylesheet”>
Implement lazy load Below the Fold Images
A browser loads a website, it must download every elements of website HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts, and images. After completing the download browser display the website visuals. This process affects your website’s load time and delays the display first visible that appears on the user screen.
You can reduce the LCP load time weight and improve the FCP by implementing loading=”lazy” on your website. This process will 50% faster your website and improve your LCP score. Lazy loading delays non-displays images until the user scrolls near them.
It’s a simple process where you only apply lazy loading to those images that appear after scrolling on the website. When you applied the lazy loading on the images it will increase the mobile loading speed and improves overall Core Web Vitals performance.
<img src=”my-image.webp” alt=”lazy loading image” loading=”lazy” />
Note: Don’t use lazy loading with hero slider images because it delays the most important content. If you want to know the fastest way to load images of slider click here the link below:
Optimize Images in HTML for SEO
Use a CDN on Your Website
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is one of the best effective tool to boost your website speed and also helps to improve user experience. When a visitor come to a website using a browser, the browser download files from your main server. If your server far from the visitor’s current location, the website load slowly. This delay affect your website’s FCP, LCP, SEO ranking and overall performance.
A CDN solves this problem by storing copies of your website’s files on multiple servers around the world. Whenever someone opens your site, the CDN delivers content from the nearest server, making the website load much faster.
What a CDN Does?
- Delivers website files from the closest server to the user
- Reduces loading time and improves Core Web Vitals
- Decreases TTFB (Time To First Byte)
- Protects your site from sudden traffic spikes
- Reduces load on your main hosting server
- Improves global website performance and SEO
In short, a CDN helps your website load faster, perform better, and deliver a smooth browsing experience to every user—no matter where they are in the world.
Enable leveraged Caching for faster website
If you are a developer and you know how to enable leveraged caching on a website, then you not enabling it is a silly mistake you’re making. It is a most important process for every fast website.
When you enabled the leveraged caching on your website it helps to store your website’s data in user’s browser cache. The Browser does not need to download the same data again and again from the main server. By enabling leveraged caching, you can easily improve your website’s FCP. If you don’t know how to enable leveraged caching on your website, click the link below:
Enhancing FCP and LCP is somewhat easier than it gives an impression of, however it still needs to be done in the right way and with a bit of perseverance. When you carry out the above mentioned activities such as image optimization, removal of the render-blocking CSS and JavaScript, caching enablement, TTFB improvement, CDN usage, and lazy loading application to a website, it becomes instantly faster and more user-friendly. These alterations not only elevate your Core Web Vitals score but also facilitate your website to rank at a higher position by Google. A quick site is one of the ways to create confidence, a positive experience for the user and further, an increase in the number of conversions. So, if you are genuinely after SEO success in the long run, you ought to begin with mending your FCP and LCP immediately.
If you want your website to load faster, improve ranking, and boost overall performance, feel free to reach out. I will analyze your site and provide the best optimization service tailored to your needs. Let’s make your website super fast and SEO-friendly.