What Is The LCP Issue In The Google Search Console?

January 3, 2023

What Is The LCP Issue In The Google Search Console? | AIA Book in a free 30 minute strategy session

Google announced back in May 2020 the Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics site owners can use to improve the quality of their site and user experience. These Core Web Vitals are:

  • LCP – Largest Contentful Paint
  • FID – First Input Delay
  • CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift

Site owners can see performance reports right in the Google Search Console, where the labels “Poor, Needs improvement, and Good” will be applied to each metric. In this article, we’ll focus on the LCP issue, and what you can do to resolve it.

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What the Issue Means

LCP measures the time taken by the server to display the largest visible element in the portview. Ideally, LCP should be less than 2.5 seconds, but if you are seeing an LCP issue in your Search Console it means the server is taking too long to render the element.

An LCP issue lowers a site’s overall Core Web Vital experience and can affect a site’s performance throughout the Google services, such as its ranking in the SERPs.

How to Fix the LCP Issue

If you are seeing an LCP issue in your Search Console, here are a few steps to resolve it:

Identify Which Pages Aren’t Loading

In your report, you will be provided with a total number of URLs on your site that are affected by the LCP issue. Once you’ve identified the URLs that are leading to the problems, use the PageSpeed Insights and enter the links to allow the tool to test them.

After the test is complete, you’ll receive additional data that can help you improve your site’s speed.

Identify the Largest Element That Is Dragging the Load Time

The report has an “Opportunity” section where you can find suggestions for improvements to help your pages load faster. Usually, it will be the element (or multiple elements) that have not been properly optimised for the web and is taking too long to load, such as an image or video.

You can simply fix these issues by either removing the element if it’s not important to your user experience or resize them to allow the page to load faster.

Validate and Re-test

SEO Sydney

Once you follow the suggestions of the Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, it’s important to test it again and see if the LCP issue has been resolved. Note that the report may not be updated right away, so you may need to wait a bit until you can see if the changes worked.

Over to You

Australian Internet Advertising is happy to assist Sydney Business owners improve the quality of their site and boost user experience, and we can do it through a personalised SEO strategy designed to help you optimise your efforts.

Get in touch with us for more information about how we can help, or call us directly at 1300 304 640.

Billy P.

About The Author

William Polson founded Australian Internet Advertising in 2013 and has over 12 years of experience immersed in Digital Marketing.

With an in-depth level of digital marketing knowledge, William has been sort after by and worked for, many large national brands including Subaru, Blooms The Chemist, and Nova 96.9.

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