Largest Contentful Paint: Crawl Audit check 72

Short answer: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the moment the biggest image or block of text in the first screen appears. It's one of Google's three Core Web Vitals. Check 72 passes at 2.5 seconds or less, warns up to 4 seconds and fails above that, matching Google's bands.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Full report: Crawl Audit asks Google PageSpeed Insights. It uses real-user data (the 75th percentile from the Chrome UX Report) when your site has enough visitors, and otherwise Lighthouse's lab test.
• Free check: no PageSpeed data, so the number is an estimate from how long your homepage took to load and how many images it has. Treat it as a rough guide, not a measurement.
• Pass: 2.5s or less. Warning: up to 4s. Fail: over 4s.

What Google says

• web.dev: "LCP reports the render time of the largest image, text block, or video visible in the viewport, relative to when the user first navigated to the page."
• Sites "should strive to have Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less", measured at "the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices."
• Google Search: "Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems." But good scores don't "guarantee that your pages will rank at the top of Google Search results", and "trying to get a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time."

On devmarde.com

On 3 October, PageSpeed Insights measured our homepage at an LCP of 1.5 seconds on mobile (lab test, Lighthouse 13.5). It showed "No Data" for real users: our traffic is still too small for the Chrome UX Report.

Common fixes

• Make the main image small and early: a modern format (check 79), the right size, and never lazy-loaded (check 100).
• Cut the wait before it: a faster server response (check 71) and fewer render-blocking files (checks 86 and 87).
• Don't hide the main content behind JavaScript that has to run before it appears.

On your platform

• WordPress: since 6.3, WordPress adds fetchpriority="high" to the image it thinks is the LCP image, and never lazy-loads that same image.
• Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: they serve images in modern formats for you. Keep hero images and sliders light.
• Next.js: next/image lazy-loads by default, so switch that off for the hero image (the Image component docs show how).

Sources

• web.dev, Largest Contentful Paint (updated 4 September 2025) and Defining the Core Web Vitals thresholds, checked 3 October 2026.
• Google Search Central, Understanding page experience (updated 22 September 2026).
• WordPress, Image performance enhancements in 6.3.