How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint: 8 Tactics for WordPress in 2025

LCP measures how long it takes for the biggest visible element on your page to load. Google cares about it. Your visitors care about it even more. A slow LCP means people bounce before they see what you’re selling.

I’ve spent some time optimizing WordPress sites, and LCP is where many site owners lose the battle. The good news is that you don’t need to be a developer to fix it.

This guide breaks down what LCP actually is, shows you how to measure it on your site, and walks through the specific tactics that work for WordPress. I’ll cover the tools and plugins that actually move the needle.

Let’s fix your load times:

What is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)?

LCP measures how quickly the largest visible content element (often a hero section image or a featured image/text block) loads on a webpage.

Depending on what your design is, that “largest element” can be different things. You can check that using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Just input your website address and then look for “LCP request discovery.” You might see something like this:

This will show you the exact area above the fold that’s considered your largest contentful paint.

Optimizing LCP is vital for user experience and SEO – Google treats Core Web Vitals (including LCP) as a ranking factor, so poor LCP can hurt search rankings and increase visitor bounce rates.

So what is good LCP? According to Google’s own docs, that would be 2.5 sec or less.

Again, you can measure your LCP and all the other metrics related through PageSpeed Insights.

All of the metrics you can see in PageSpeed Insights are connected, so learning how to improve your Largest Contentful Paint can help you improve other web vitals as well.

Below I outline up-to-date tactics (as of 2025) to improve LCP across WordPress blogs, business sites, and even ecommerce (WooCommerce) stores. I go through WordPress-friendly solutions, relevant plugins/tools, code/hosting optimizations, and explanations of how each tactic enhances LCP performance.

How to improve LCP on WordPress

Blogs are often image-heavy and content-focused. The typical LCP element on a blog page is the featured image or a large text headline.

Common issues there include large unoptimized images (featured or in-post media) that slow down rendering, lack of caching (causing repeat visitors to reload all assets), and render-blocking theme assets (CSS/JS) from heavy themes or plugins.

Blogs may also use third-party widgets (social share scripts, comment systems, etc.) that, if loaded improperly, delay the main content.

Business sites, on the other hand, often feature a large hero section on the homepage – a banner image, slider, or video background. If that hero media is not optimized, LCP will suffer. Additionally, many corporate sites use page builders or heavy multi-purpose themes for design, resulting in substantial complex code that can block rendering.

Lastly, WooCommerce sites are dynamic and image-rich, which introduces unique challenges beyond a standard blog/business site.

Typical issues include unoptimized product images (product photos or banners that are large and uncompressed), render-blocking resources from themes and WooCommerce’s own scripts/styles, heavy third-party scripts like analytics, A/B testing, review widgets, chat, and tag managers. Then, there’s also a common illness among many ecommerce stores: lack of caching – many store pages aren’t cached by default (cart, checkout, user-specific content).

Here are some tactics you can implement to make your LCP better across all these site types:

1. Optimize your images

The no.1 thing you can do, and the simplest fix actually, is to take care of the main space-consuming type of element on your site – your images.

Large images are a top cause of slow LCP. Reducing image file size and dimensions means the browser can load and render the largest element faster, directly lowering LCP.

Compress, resize, and optimize your images (especially the featured images) to reduce file size without noticeable quality loss – this can be done easily.

For example, you can install the Optimole plugin. Optimole handles every part of image optimizing on autopilot – for all of your existing images (and any new images).

It will help you convert images to modern formats like WebP (widely supported by browsers nowadays) for better compression. This prevents slow load times. And this involves all your images – the ones in your blog posts and also any featured/hero images.

Staying on the topic of images for one more sec:

2. Exclude above-the-fold images from lazy loading

WordPress’ native lazy loading (and most image plugins) by default can lazy-load all images. However, you shouldn’t actually lazy-load the primary featured image or any image at the top of the post.

Lazy-loading an in-viewport image delays its fetch until after page load, which increases LCP. Ensure the first image on the page is excluded from lazy load and instead loaded immediately.

If you’re already using Optimole, you can set exactly how many of your initial images should be lazy loaded, so you got that covered.

Alternatively, most caching plugins (more on those in a sec) allow specifying these lazy loading settings, too.

Once you handle this, it removes the artificial delay in loading the largest element. The browser can start loading the hero image right away rather than waiting until after other content renders. All other below-the-fold images should be lazy-loaded to save bandwidth, but above-the-fold LCP images must load immediately. This ensures the LCP element isn’t held back.

3. Use a caching plugin

If your host doesn’t already implement caching at the server level, another solution for how to improve Largest Contentful Paint is to use a WordPress caching plugin.

These plugins reduce the work that your server needs to do to render each visit, which means that your server can serve up the page’s assets faster (and consequently make your LCP time a lot faster).

Some of these plugins do other things to speed up your website as well:

• CSS and JavaScript minification
• Database cleaning and optimization
• CDN management
• Image lazy load
• Heartbeat control
• Core Web Vitals optimization
• WP-CLI cache purging

We recommend Super Page Cache for a plugin that’s easy to configure and filled with advanced features to fully optimize your site speed.

4. Connect with a content delivery network (CDN)

Serving static content (images, CSS, JS) via a CDN can improve LCP for global visitors by reducing latency.

A CDN caches website content on servers all over the world, allowing users to load your website from the server closest to them. This improves the loading time for visitors from locations far away from the main server hosting your website.

*If you use Optimole, you’ll already be benefiting from a CDN for your site’s images. However, you might want to also serve your site’s other static files via a CDN (or even entire pages).

Many web hosts like Bluehost bundle a CDN into some or all of their web hosting plans. If your web host doesn’t include CDN with its hosting plans, you have two options: switch to a host that does or install a CDN on your website yourself. Setting it up yourself is a bit more complicated, but there are several high-quality CDN services for WordPress for you to choose from.

Speaking of Bluehost:

5. Consider upgrading your hosting plan

Your hosting company and your hosting plan can influence your website loading speed in a few ways:

• Shared servers are slower because you’re sharing resources with other users. The difference here isn’t huge for small websites but it can be significant if one or more high-traffic websites are sharing a server. If your website is getting a lot of traffic, consider switching to a VPS hosting plan. There’s a good chance you’ll be able to upgrade to VPS without switching web hosts, but it’s also worth looking into cheap VPS hosting to save some money.
• CDNs, which we’ve already discussed, aren’t offered by all web hosts. Other web hosts limit them to certain plans. This can be a good reason to switch hosting plans or to a new company altogether.
• Some web hosts are slower than others regardless of the plan you choose. If you think your web host itself is the problem, look at reviews of the company from people who have actually run speed tests on them (we are such people, by the way). This can tell you if you’re right about the web host and need to switch.

If you’re going to stick with your current host, though, there are still things you can do.

For example, use the latest PHP version (PHP 8.x) and ensure the server has adequate resources available. Faster server response lowers TTFB, directly improving LCP.

A good chunk of LCP is the server response and content transfer time. By using fast hosting and CDNs, you cut down the wait. For instance, moving from a slow shared host to a performance-optimized host can significantly reduce LCP times. Many hosts now support modern HTTP/2 …/3 and compression out of the box, which further accelerate content delivery.

In short, a robust hosting stack ensures the largest content is delivered as quickly as possible.

6. Eliminate render-blocking resources

Because LCP measures how long it takes your main content to load, you want to stop as many elements as possible from loading before that main element.

By default, your site might load JavaScript and CSS files early in the loading process, which could actually be delayed until later. By delaying (or “deferring”) these scripts, you can make your LCP element load faster.

For example, deferring a heavy slideshow script ensures the featured content (e.g. title or image) renders first, improving perceived load time.

So, minify CSS and JavaScript files to eliminate unnecessary characters/whitespace and reduce file sizes. Caching plugins should help you do that.

For more details, check out our full guide on how to eliminate render-blocking resources.

7. Eliminate heavy sliders/animations

If your site uses an image slider or heavy animations in the hero section, consider replacing it with a static optimized image or using a more lightweight slider that doesn’t block rendering.

This is a common practice on ecommerce stores in particular – after all, it’s always nice to show off your latest collection front and center.

However, each additional slide image or animation script can add to LCP.

Simplifying the above-the-fold content ensures the browser has only one primary element to load for LCP.

For example, loading a single optimized hero image will complete faster than waiting for a carousel’s JavaScript and multiple images.

If a slider is necessary, lazy-load secondary slides and load slider scripts after the first slide is visible. This way, the first slide (LCP) appears quickly and the user can see content while the rest loads in the background.

8. Optimize product images and thumbnails

It seems we’re back at square one with this – talking about images again – but this deserves a point of its own.

Many site owners simply don’t realize that their product images are key for the everyday level of their site’s optimization – and for their LCP especially.

High-quality product images are crucial for ecommerce, sure, but they must be optimized. Compress all product images (use lossy compression with acceptable quality or modern formats like WebP/AVIF) and ensure you serve properly sized images for their containers.

WooCommerce generates multiple thumbnail sizes; configure these so they match your theme’s displayed dimensions to avoid loading an overly large image scaled down.

Do not lazy-load the main product image on product pages or the primary banner image on landing pages – that image is the LCP element and should load immediately.

You can lazy-load secondary images (like images further down a product gallery or additional product listings below the fold) to save bandwidth.

Product images often occupy the largest pixel area (hence LCP). By shrinking file size and resolution, you reduce the time to fetch and render them. Serving images in next-gen formats can significantly cut file sizes, too.

Again, a tool like Optimole will handle this optimization for you all on autopilot. It will also convert images to WebP/AVIF and serve proper tags for broader browser compatibility.

That’s how to improve Largest Contentful Paint!

LCP is one of the most important website metrics to pay attention to. It has a big impact on your site’s user experience. Plus, if your LCP times are too slow, they could be a drag on your site’s Google search rankings.

The good news is that improving your LCP doesn’t have to be difficult or involve code. In fact, there are simple tactics you can use to improve not just your Largest Contentful Paint but also your overall site loading speed.

For some more general tips, you can also check out our full guide to website speed optimization and our tips for WordPress performance optimization.

Do you still have any questions about how to improve Largest Contentful Paint on your website? Let us know in the comments!