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First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a performance metric that measures the time it takes for the first piece of content to be rendered on the screen when a user navigates to a web page. This content can be any visual element on the page, such as text, images, or a background color.

FCP is important because it directly affects the perceived speed of a website, and can impact user engagement and conversion rates. A faster FCP can lead to a better user experience and improved performance.

Here are a few ways you can optimise your FCP:

1. Optimise images: Large, unoptimised images can slow down a page’s FCP. You can optimise images by compressing them, reducing their dimensions, and choosing the right format for each image.
2. Minimise HTTP requests: Each resource requested by a web page, such as images, scripts, and stylesheets, requires a separate HTTP request. Minimising the number of HTTP requests can help to reduce the time it takes for a page to render.
3. Prioritize critical content: Prioritizing critical content, such as above-the-fold content, can help to ensure that users see something on the screen quickly, even if the rest of the page is still loading.
4. Reduce server response time: A slow server response time can significantly impact FCP. Optimizing server-side code and server settings can help to reduce response times and improve FCP.
5. Use a performance monitoring tool: There are many tools available that can help you monitor your website’s performance, including FCP. These tools can help you identify performance issues and track your progress as you implement optimizations.

Largest Contentful Paint marks the time at which the largest text or image is painted. Learn more about the Largest Contentful Paint metric

Sum of all time periods between FCP and Time to Interactive, when task length exceeded 50ms, expressed in milliseconds. Learn more about the Total Blocking Time metric.

Cumulative Layout Shift measures the movement of visible elements within the viewport. Learn more about the Cumulative Layout Shift metric.

Speed Index shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated. Learn more about the Speed Index metric.

Time to Interactive is the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive. Learn more about the Time to Interactive metric.

The maximum potential First Input Delay that your users could experience is the duration of the longest task. Learn more about the Maximum Potential First Input Delay metric.

First Meaningful Paint measures when the primary content of a page is visible. Learn more about the First Meaningful Paint metric.

Resources are blocking the first paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles. Learn how to eliminate render-blocking resources.

Serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data and improve load time. Learn how to size images.

Reduce unused rules from stylesheets and defer CSS not used for above-the-fold content to decrease bytes consumed by network activity. Learn how to reduce unused CSS.

Reduce unused JavaScript and defer loading scripts until they are required to decrease bytes consumed by network activity. Learn how to reduce unused JavaScript.

Image formats like WebP and AVIF often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption. Learn more about modern image formats.

Polyfills and transforms enable legacy browsers to use new JavaScript features. However, many aren't necessary for modern browsers. For your bundled JavaScript, adopt a modern script deployment strategy using module/nomodule feature detection to reduce the amount of code shipped to modern browsers, while retaining support for legacy browsers. Learn how to use modern JavaScript

Large network payloads cost users real money and are highly correlated with long load times. Learn how to reduce payload sizes.

A long cache lifetime can speed up repeat visits to your page. Learn more about efficient cache policies.

A large DOM will increase memory usage, cause longer style calculations, and produce costly layout reflows. Learn how to avoid an excessive DOM size.

Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling, and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this. Learn how to reduce Javascript execution time.

Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this. Learn how to minimize main-thread work

Third-party code can significantly impact load performance. Limit the number of redundant third-party providers and try to load third-party code after your page has primarily finished loading. Learn how to minimize third-party impact.

Consider marking your touch and wheel event listeners as passive to improve your page's scroll performance. Learn more about adopting passive event listeners.

Set an explicit width and height on image elements to reduce layout shifts and improve CLS. Learn how to set image dimensions

Focusable descendents within an [aria-hidden="true"] element prevent those interactive elements from being available to users of assistive technologies like screen readers. Learn how aria-hidden affects focusable elements.

Some ARIA parent roles must contain specific child roles to perform their intended accessibility functions. Learn more about roles and required children elements.

ARIA roles must have valid values in order to perform their intended accessibility functions. Learn more about valid ARIA roles.

When a button doesn't have an accessible name, screen readers announce it as "button", making it unusable for users who rely on screen readers. Learn how to make buttons more accessible.

Low-contrast text is difficult or impossible for many users to read. Learn how to provide sufficient color contrast.

All focusable elements must have a unique id to ensure that they're visible to assistive technologies. Learn how to fix duplicate ids.

The value of an ARIA ID must be unique to prevent other instances from being overlooked by assistive technologies. Learn how to fix duplicate ARIA IDs.

Properly ordered headings that do not skip levels convey the semantic structure of the page, making it easier to navigate and understand when using assistive technologies. Learn more about heading order.

Informative elements should aim for short, descriptive alternate text. Decorative elements can be ignored with an empty alt attribute. Learn more about the alt attribute.

Link text (and alternate text for images, when used as links) that is discernible, unique, and focusable improves the navigation experience for screen reader users. Learn how to make links accessible.

A value greater than 0 implies an explicit navigation ordering. Although technically valid, this often creates frustrating experiences for users who rely on assistive technologies. Learn more about the tabindex attribute.

Google Analytics collects data on website users and their behaviour, which can raise privacy concerns for some visitors. Website owners who use Google Analytics have access to a range of data points, including IP addresses, browser types, device information, and user behaviour on the site.

While Google Analytics does provide some tools to help website owners protect the privacy of their visitors, such as data retention controls and the ability to enable IP address anonymisation, it’s important for website owners to be transparent about the data they collect and how they use it. Website owners should also take steps to ensure that any third-party tools they use, including Google Analytics, comply with relevant privacy laws and regulations.

Additionally, some users may choose to block Google Analytics tracking using ad-blocking software or browser extensions that prevent tracking cookies from being set. This can impact the accuracy of website analytics, but website owners should respect the privacy preferences of their visitors and provide alternative means for users to access the site and its content.

The following alternatives to Google Analytics are privacy focussed, meaning they don’t compromise the visitors privacy for the sake of data collection and reporting.

• Plausible
• Cabin
• Fathom
• Simple Analytics
• Insights
• Matomo

Links with descriptive text can provide users with more context about the content they are clicking on, which can help them to make informed decisions about whether to follow the link or not. This is especially important for users with disabilities, as screen readers can use the link text to provide an audio description of the content.

In addition, links with descriptive text can also improve the overall user experience, as users are more likely to know what to expect when they follow a link. This can reduce the likelihood of users bouncing back from a page after finding that it’s not what they were looking for, which can help to improve the user engagement and retention on a website.

Furthermore, descriptive links can also help to improve a website\’s search engine optimisation (SEO). Search engines use the link text and surrounding context to understand the content of a page, and this information is used to determine the relevance of a page for specific search queries. Descriptive links can help search engines to understand the content of a page more accurately, which can improve its visibility and ranking in search results.

Search engines may use href attributes on links to crawl websites. Ensure that the href attribute of anchor elements links to an appropriate destination, so more pages of the site can be discovered. Learn how to make links crawlable

Informative elements should aim for short, descriptive alternate text. Decorative elements can be ignored with an empty alt attribute. Learn more about the alt attribute.

Errors logged to the console indicate unresolved problems. They can come from network request failures and other browser concerns. Learn more about this errors in console diagnostic audit