Understanding First Contentful Paint

1. Understanding First Contentful Paint One of the most important measures in Google's Core Web Vitals is your website's First Contentful Paint (FCP). FCP isn't a purely technical statistic when it comes to response time, unlike other paint and loading metrics. The focus of FCP is on the user's experience and what they see immediately on the site, rather than what loads in the background. You're not just speeding up overall load times and raising page speed ratings by optimizing your site's First Contentful Paint; you're also literally displaying your visitors that their requests are being serviced and that loading hasn't paused. What is First Contentful Paint (FCP)? First Contentful Paint happens when the browser renders the first element on your page. Images, non-white canvas elements, and text all fall into this category. Simply put FCP is when the user sees the first element on your website. Most of the time it’s the header or a background image. This element may not be the first to be rendered or loaded from the server, but it is the first that the user sees, making it critical to the user experience of your website. The FCP metric is a unique one. It's quantifiable, but it's also subjective. It's critical to have a speedy First Contentful Paint since it gives the impression that your site is loading rapidly to the user. It may or may not be true. Although your site may have a substantially longer First Interactive Delay (the time after which a user can interact with the site) than competitors, users may perceive it to be faster because of its shorter FCP. FCP, on the other hand, isn't about deceiving your audience. A fast FCP time is a good predictor of overall page speed, and the tactics you use to improve it can have an impact on other page-speed metrics (such as Largest Contentful Paint). With Auditzy, you can perform a website audit easily to find out the FCP metric of your website along with all the other performance metrics and core web vitals. Auditzy is an omnichannel platform built on top of Google Lighthouse APIs that helps you monitor your website’s overall health and gain insights into it. How to Measure First Contentful Paint (FCP)

2. Even if user perception is crucial, FCP is a quantifiable statistic that can be measured and graded. You can use these tools to determine FCP’s influence in the field (with actual users) vs in the lab (simulated page loads for testing purposes). Before you start using the various tools to verify your FCP, you should understand what a good FCP score is. We can see that Google rates FCP times in three categories—good, needs improvement, and poor—and outlines how they reach the percentile ranking utilized by their Lighthouse tool in their documentation on establishing metric scores. ● Between 0 and 1.8 seconds is ideal. ● Needs to be improved — between 1.8 and 3 seconds ● Over 3 seconds is too long. We've included a list of tools below that you can use to see which of these categories your site falls into. 1. Field Tools Field tools are tools that you can use to track how your users interact with the website. Actual users. These tools don't make assumptions about your site or rely on APIs. They communicate directly with your server in real-time, ensuring that you receive the most accurate and up-to-date data possible. According to Google's FCP literature on https://web.dev, the following are the best field tools for assessing FCP: ● PageSpeed Insights ● Chrome User Experience Report ● Search Console (Speed Report) ● Web Vitals JavaScript library 2. Lab Tools FCP checking lab tools tend to produce results that are similar to what your FCP would be under perfect circumstances. Rather than simulating real-world problems like latency, bandwidth, network congestion, and other impediments, Google's lab tools show you what your site can be when it's performing at its best.

3. Furthermore, it is impossible to test a site that has not yet reached production under real-world settings when it is being developed. As your project progresses through the development cycle, lab tools can also assist you in establishing benchmarks and milestones. ● Lighthouse ● Chrome DevTools ● PageSpeed Insights How To Improve First Contentful Paint (FCP) We'll go over some of the most frequent steps for fixing First Contentful Paint timings so you'll be prepared for whatever the tests and tools throw at you. 1. Get rid of Render Blocking Resources: Render blocking resources are files that must be present on your website in order for your page to render. HTML, JavaScript, fonts, and CSS files are among them. They're called "render-blocking" because they take precedence over everything else on the page, halting the loading process until they're finished. Images, plain text, and other user-facing content are on hold until the critical files are completed. FCP rises dramatically as a result of this hold for two reasons: ● The size of render-blocking files is usually quite enormous. ● Render blocking files normally just contain structure and formatting, not site content. You free up space for contentful painting by removing these resources from the key rendering path. You may postpone resource loading, avoid using @import for CSS (instead, use @media for conditional CSS), and minify and merge your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. 2. Show Texts Immediately: Have you ever visited a website where all of the text on a page appears all at once, despite the fact that all of the other material on the page is already there? That's because it's hidden by the browser. Text material on the site does not load until it is ready to read. Text usually contains only a few bytes of information. However, many websites can take an inordinate amount of time to load. Because the font file isn't "display-ready." Getting your site's text content painted is one of the finest ways to have a lightning-fast FCP time.

4. You can tell the browser to load your site's text using a system font and then replace it with your selected display font once it's loaded using various font-display settings. Text content has a small file size, generally only a few bytes, and telling browsers to show it immediately can reduce your FCP to nearly nothing. Simply include font-display: swap in your @font-face CSS. That might be enough to solve a lot of your First Contentful Paint time problems. 3. Minification: Extraneous characters (such as spaces) are removed from your site's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files during minification. White space makes it easier for people to read and process, it is unnecessary for browsers and servers. Those spaces are still characters that take up space in the memory. You can reduce the size of your page by minifying things like your CSS files. This improves page performance and the time it takes to FCP. 4. Removing Unused CSS: Any obsolete or unneeded code should be removed so that it isn't loaded every time your website is accessed. Under the Coverage tab of Chrome DevTools, you can see which parts of your CSS are being loaded but not rendered. 5. Reducing Time-To-First-Byte (TTFB): TTFB refers to the time when the first byte of data is sent to the browser. This measure is crucial to FCP, therefore the faster it is, the sooner your First Contentful Paint will be. The most effective strategies for lowering TTFB and speeding up your page are straightforward: ● utilize a good host ● use a CDN to provide content ● enable browser caching Making sure those three factors are taken care of properly can reduce TTFB and, as a result, your FCP significantly. First Contentful Paint (FCP) FAQ’s 1. How Does FCP Fit into My Website’s Overall Performance? Not much in terms of a direct metric of site performance. FCP is a perception statistic for users that isn't always representative of site performance. As previously stated in the text, two websites may have the same loading time, but the one with the smaller FCP time may be perceived as being faster. This notion

5. can have an impact on the user experience, if not the overall performance of the website. However, First Contentful Paint is an excellent measure to monitor in order to improve overall site speed. Any measures you take to slow down FCP will slow down your entire page. As a result, you may nearly interpret it as a barometer of your total success. A low FCP time does not always imply a high overall load time, so if you only need one metric to determine where you stand, FCP can be a decent starting point. You may also use it in conjunction with LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) to get a more comprehensive picture of what your visitors see in the initial few seconds of visiting your site. 2. What’s the Difference Between First Paint and First Contentful Paint? Despite the fact that the two phrases are sometimes used interchangeably, they represent two distinct measurements. As previously stated, First Contentful Paint occurs when the browser produces the page's first DOM element. This could be any usable (but non-interactive) content on the website. Consider a backdrop image, text, or your header menu div. Initial Paint, on the other hand, is when the browser renders the first bytes of data, whether or not they are content. A change in backdrop color (rather than the loading of a background image) isn't really interesting. It cannot be consumed as content by the user, hence it is not an example of FCP. Your First Contented Paint could be the same as your First Paint. Your FCP, on the other hand, might not be the same as your First Paint. Conclusion For your website, FCP is a must-have metric. Google considers page speed to be one of the most important factors in determining your page's ranking. Users consider page speed to be one of the most important elements in determining whether or not to stay on your site. A low First Contentful Paint can help consumers stay on your site longer and find it in the first place. Even though FCP is a difficult statistic to grasp, any improvements in FCP time will improve UX and result in precious seconds and milliseconds being shaved off your site's total loading times.