How Google’s Latest Update Is Affecting Your Website Ranking – Fcp & Lcp

By Author: Rosario Berry
Total Articles: 317
Comment this article

If you haven’t run for cover yet, now is the time. Because Google is dropping a big update and it can affect your website’s ranking significantly. If you take action early, you can save your site’s search engine ranking from going downhill. But if you don’t, be prepared to kill customers.

We have strong reasons to believe that FCP and LCP are the Google metrics that are going to define the next list of Google ranking. The better your page load speed is, the higher there are chances to rank and to save your conversion rates.

What are FCP and LCP?

First things first; you have to know what these metrics mean so that you can fix them. FCP is an acronym for First Contentful Paint, and LCP is short for Largest Contentful Paint. If you read the terms twice, you would get an idea of what we are talking about.

It’s simple, really. The time taken to load the first piece of content on your site is its FCP – the first indication that your site is loading. Usually, this is text on the first page, the first few links, the header or the logo of the website.

Similarly, the time is taken to load ...
... the largest piece of content (can be image or text block) that comes visible within the viewport is reported by the LCP metric. Ideally, the best time for LCP is 2.5 seconds – but that’s hard to achieve. Anything less than 3 seconds is okay, and more than that needs prompt attention.

How can we obtain the speed metrics?

There are many resources that you can tap into to get the vital metrics for page loading speed. All core website vitals are available on www.web.dev/metrics, which is Google’s resource for building on the web. For mobile or desktop page speed insights, you can log on to www.developers.google.com/speed. If you want to see how your sites are measuring up, you can find it on the Search Console with the URL www.search.google.com/search-console.

Now that we have explored the terms and the ways to access the metrics, we will look into the various ways of optimizing for the page’s speed.

How to optimize for page speed?

Fixing the page speed is determined by a lot of different factors, one of the important ones is the hosting server. Therefore, the first thing you can do is contact your server administrator and have them check whether the resources are minimized due to lack of bandwidth or RAM. In other cases, a shared server can also downsize the loading speed significantly, so you may want to expand the plan or get more RAM to your server.

The other way to check and optimize for page speed is to see how the images are loading on your site. You can add in a “source” image that is smaller in size than the product image on the product page, where the customers tend to zoom in. This will also help improve the speed metrics.

And lastly, you may want to remove render-blocking JavaScript or CSS using certain apps, plugins, or extensions to clean up the various blockers. These apps/plugins do a good job at either minimizing, deferring, or removing the JavaScript and allows your page to load at its best.

If you’ve got a slow website, it’s high time to look into these metrics and fix the faults so that your ranking can survive the storm. As you have seen, these are pretty simple findings that you can inspect on the go.

Looking to improve your website ranking. Reach out to one of the trusted SEO companies in San Diego.

About the Author:

Rosario Berry is a professional freelance writer, like to introduce Mystic Web Designs San Diego California. Looking to improve your website ranking. Reach out to one of the trusted Search Engine Optimization Companies and find ways to improve your website ranking.

Rosario Berry is an eminent author writing and publishing articles on various topics.