How to Fix First Contentful Paint (FCP) on Any Website

First Contentful Paint measures how quickly visitors see the first piece of content. A slow FCP makes your site feel broken before it has loaded.

What is First Contentful Paint?

First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures the time from when the browser starts loading a page to when it renders the first piece of DOM content — text, an image, a canvas, or an SVG.

Google considers FCP under 1.8 seconds good. Between 1.8 and 3 seconds needs improvement. Above 3 seconds is poor.

FCP is not a Core Web Vital, but it directly predicts how users perceive your site's speed. A slow FCP makes visitors think the page is broken.

The most common causes of slow FCP

Render-blocking resources

CSS and JavaScript files in the block the browser from rendering anything until they have been downloaded and processed. Every render-blocking file delays FCP.

Fix:

Audit your for and