LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
How fast the main content becomes visible on a page.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the time from navigation start until the largest visible content element — usually the hero image or H1 — is rendered. It's one of Google's three Core Web Vitals.
Context
LCP measures perceived load speed from a user's perspective, which correlates tightly with bounce rate and conversion. Google treats LCP as a ranking signal, though a tiebreaker — content quality still matters more than speed.
The threshold for a 'good' LCP is under 2.5 seconds on 75% of real-user sessions (measured via Chrome UX Report). Under 1 second is exceptional; over 4 seconds is considered poor and actively hurts rankings.
Every 1 second of LCP improvement is associated with approximately 10% conversion lift for ecommerce (Portent; Google). Sites that load in 1 second convert at 3x the rate of sites that load in 5 seconds.
Lab scores from PageSpeed Insights don't always match real user data. Googlebot uses field data (real Chrome users) for ranking — so the number that matters is what real visitors experience, not what your developer sees in a local test.
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The percentage of people who clicked after seeing your link, ad, or snippet.
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hreflang
Markup that tells Google which language/region version of a page to show.
Canonical URL
The authoritative URL for a page when duplicate or near-duplicate versions exist.