Hornsby Shire Council

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.

Minifying CSS files can reduce network payload sizes. Learn how to minify CSS.

Minifying JavaScript files can reduce payload sizes and script parse time. Learn how to minify JavaScript.

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.

Optimized images load faster and consume less cellular data. Learn how to efficiently encode images.

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.

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.

For users on slow connections, external scripts dynamically injected via document.write() can delay page load by tens of seconds. Learn how to avoid document.write().

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

Each ARIA role supports a specific subset of aria-* attributes. Mismatching these invalidates the aria-* attributes. Learn how to match ARIA attributes to their roles.

ARIA roles enable assistive technologies to know the role of each element on the web page. If the role values are misspelled, not existing ARIA role values, or abstract roles, then the purpose of the element will not be communicated to users of assistive technologies. Learn more about ARIA roles.

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 roles have required attributes that describe the state of the element to screen readers. Learn more about roles and required attributes.

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

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.

Low-contrast text is difficult or impossible for many users to read. Link text that is discernible improves the experience for users with low vision. Learn how to make links distinguishable.

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.

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

All sites should be protected with HTTPS, even ones that don't handle sensitive data. This includes avoiding mixed content, where some resources are loaded over HTTP despite the initial request being served over HTTPS. HTTPS prevents intruders from tampering with or passively listening in on the communications between your app and your users, and is a prerequisite for HTTP/2 and many new web platform APIs. Learn more about HTTPS.

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