# What is LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)?

> LCP measures how long the biggest visible element on a page, usually a large image or headline, takes to appear; Google rates 2.5 seconds or less as good.

- Source: https://nerdsharks.com/glossary/lcp
- Publisher: Nerdsharks (Exeter, Devon, UK)
- Updated: 2026-09-26

Also called: Largest Contentful Paint, loading speed.

Largest Contentful Paint is one of the three Core Web Vitals. It records the moment the largest image or block of text in the visitor's first screen finishes showing, which is roughly when the page feels loaded.

Google's thresholds: 2.5 seconds or less is good, up to 4 seconds needs improvement, and over 4 seconds is poor, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits.

The usual culprits are huge, uncompressed images, slow hosting, and heavy code that has to load before anything appears.

## Why it matters for a small business

People searching on a phone for someone to fix a problem are impatient. If the main part of your homepage takes several seconds to appear, some of them will be back on Google before they see your number.

**Example:** A roofer's homepage hero photo is a 6 MB file straight from a camera. Resized and saved in a modern format, it is a small fraction of that, and the LCP drops sharply.