Your LCP value is 5619.998 and your score is bad
Your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a critical user-centric metric that measures the loading performance of your page by marking the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport. A poor LCP score, like the one observed, indicates that users are waiting a significant amount of time to see the main content of your page, which can negatively impact user experience and engagement.
Analyzing the breakdown of your LCP time reveals that the primary bottleneck is the "Load Delay" of the LCP candidate, which is an image. This suggests that while the image itself loads quickly once discovered, its discovery or loading was significantly delayed. Optimizing the critical rendering path and ensuring the LCP image is discovered and loaded early are key areas for improvement.
The main contributor to your poor LCP is the substantial load delay of the largest contentful image. To improve this, focus on making the LCP image discoverable and loadable as early as possible in the page load process. This involves ensuring the image is not lazy-loaded if it's the LCP candidate and potentially preloading it to prioritize its download. Additionally, investigate resources blocking the critical rendering path that might be preventing the browser from discovering the LCP image sooner.
- TTFB: 1ms: Your Time to First Byte is excellent, indicating that the server response time is not a factor in your slow LCP.
- Load Delay: 5553ms: This is the most significant part of your LCP time. The LCP image was not discovered or started loading until very late in the page load process. Optimize LCP by making the LCP image discoverable from the HTML immediately, and avoiding lazy-loading.
- Load Time: 26ms: Once the LCP image started loading, it downloaded very quickly. The issue is not the image file size or network speed for the image itself, but the delay before it began loading.
- Render Delay: 42ms: The time taken to render the LCP image after it loaded is minimal and not a significant factor in the overall LCP time.
- Render-blocking resources: The trace data shows several render-blocking CSS resources from both the main origin and a third-party origin (
cdn.cookielaw.org). These resources can block the browser from rendering content and discovering resources like the LCP image, contributing to the load delay. Consider optimizing or deferring non-critical CSS to unblock rendering. - JavaScript execution: Significant time is spent on JavaScript execution from various origins, including the main origin and numerous third parties. While not directly part of the LCP breakdown, heavy JavaScript can block the main thread and delay parsing of HTML and CSS, potentially impacting the discovery of the LCP image and other critical resources.
To further improve your LCP, consider using <link rel="preload"> for the LCP image to give it high priority. Investigate the critical rendering path to identify which resources are delaying the discovery of the LCP image. Analyze the waterfall chart in your trace to see exactly when the LCP image request starts and what resources are loading or blocking before it. Auditing third-party scripts and their impact on the main thread during the initial load phase is also recommended.