---
title: "LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — monitoring glossary"
description: "Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time from navigation start until the largest visible element on the screen finishes rendering. It is one of three…"
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/glossary/lcp"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

> Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time from navigation start until the largest visible element on the screen finishes rendering. It is one of three Core Web Vitals and the primary perceived-loading metric.

## Definition

 The largest element is usually a hero image, a poster video, or a large block of text. LCP is sensitive to slow servers (high TTFB), render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, large unoptimised images, and lazy-loading the hero image (which delays its discovery).

 Google's official thresholds are: Good ≤ 2.5 s, Needs Improvement 2.5–4.0 s, Poor > 4.0 s. The 75th percentile across real users is what counts for ranking.

## Why it matters

 LCP is the easiest Core Web Vital to fix — preload the LCP image, serve it as WebP/AVIF at the right size, eliminate render-blocking resources, and put your origin behind a CDN. Improvements show up in field data within 28 days.

 See it in the product: [Performance monitoring](https://lemwatch.com/features).


## Related

- [Monitoring glossary](https://lemwatch.com/glossary)
- [Core Web Vitals](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/core-web-vitals)
- [TTFB](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/ttfb)
- [CLS](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/cls)
- [INP](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/inp)
- [All monitoring checks](https://lemwatch.com/features)
- [Lighthouse](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/lighthouse)