What is a good LCP score?

Under 2.5 seconds is good. Between 2.5s and 4s needs improvement. Over 4s is poor. These thresholds are for the 75th percentile of page loads.

Performance

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Q: What counts as the LCP element?

The LCP element is the largest image, video poster, or block of text visible in the viewport on initial load. This is usually a hero image, H1 heading, or above-the-fold banner.

Last updated: April 2026

LCP measures how long it takes for the largest visible element in the viewport to render. It is one of Google's Core Web Vitals and a direct search ranking signal. Target: under 2.5 seconds.

What counts as the LCP element

The browser tracks the largest element visible in the viewport: images, video poster images, background images loaded via CSS, and large blocks of text. Usually the hero image or main heading.

Fix 1 — preload the LCP image

<link rel="preload" as="image" href="/hero.webp"
  fetchpriority="high" type="image/webp">

Fix 2 — add fetchpriority to the image tag

<img src="/hero.webp" fetchpriority="high"
  width="1200" height="600" alt="Hero image">

Fix 3 — serve images from a CDN with long cache

# Nginx: cache images at CDN edge
location ~* \.(jpg|webp|png|avif)$ {
    expires 30d;
    add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=2592000" always;
}

Fix 4 — use Cloudflare Early Hints

# Cloudflare automatically sends Early Hints for preloaded resources
# Enable: Cloudflare Dashboard -> Speed -> Optimization -> Early Hints

Fix 5 — reduce server response time (TTFB)

LCP cannot start until the browser receives the HTML. Reduce TTFB with caching, CDN, and faster server-side rendering.