How To Fix LCP For Text Elements And H1 Headings

Seeing an text element, like an H1 heading, reported as the Largest Contentful Paint element on your website? This guide explains what this means and how you can fix it.

Text and headings as the Largest Contentful Paint element

Page speed tools like Lighthouse or DebugBear will tell you long after opening a page the largest content element on the page becomes visible.

The LCP element can be:

• A text element, like a heading or <p> tag
• An image or video element

If a piece of text is responsible for the LCP, that element is often an H1 heading. That's because these tags are the primary page heading and tend to use a large font.

Here's what this might look like in the DebugBear speed test:

And here's an example from Google's Lighthouse test result on PageSpeed Insights, showing the Largest Contentful Paint element audit:

Both of these screenshots also show the LCP sub-parts breakdown. You'll see that the Load Delay and Load Time for text elements are always zero, as those only apply to downloading image files that are required to render the LCP element.

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How to fix poor LCP for text elements

To fix LCP for text elements like headings there are a few things to consider:

• Is the server response slow?
• Are render-blocking scripts delaying content?
• Do fonts need to load to display the element?
• Is the element rendered using JavaScript?

Is the server response slow?

The first thing to check is whether the server takes a long time to serve the HTML document, or whether there are client-side rendering delays.

You can do that by looking at the Time to First Byte (TTFB) component of the LCP score. You can see an example in this request waterfall, where the poor TTFB means it takes a while for page content to appear.

Are render blocking scripts delaying content?

For browsers to display content it's not enough to load the HTML code. Important render-blocking files, like stylesheets and JavaScript code, also first need to load.

Here's an example of that. Two factors are slowing down the render-blocking resources:

1. The first stylesheet references another one via @import, so a new blocking resource is discovered by the browser over 3 seconds after the page has started loading
2. The HTML and the two stylesheets are all loaded from separate domains. That means new server connections need to be set up to download each file.

Do fonts need to load to display the element?

If a web font is required to render text then this will slow down your Largest Contentful Paint score. However, there are a few fixes for this:

1. Use font-display: swap to show a fallback font until the custom woff2 file has been downloaded
2. Use a preload tag to load the font early and prevent delays

Is the element rendered using JavaScript?

For a typical application, text elements are rendered server-side and include in the document HTML.

However, sometimes JavaScript is required to display content:

1. For single-page applications (SPAs)
2. For modals like cookie banners and email signup modals

The screenshot below shows a very large render delay component, as it takes a while to download the JavaScript code files and run the code once it's loaded.

An example of a p tag as the LCP element

Paragraph tags can also be responsible for the Largest Contentful Paint element, like in the example below. The steps to fix this are the same as for other text elements: start by checking your server response time and any render-blocking scripts.

Div tags as the LCP element

Like other elements that contain text, <div>s can also be the largest content element on the page. Here's an example:

The request waterfall view can give you a lot of insight into what's happening on the network and holding back rendering.

Headings, p, and divs tags can also render images

Headings, paragraphs, and divs are all primarily wrappers for text content. But using CSS stylesheets, they can also be assigned background images. So sometimes you'll see an image LCP for these elements as well.

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While the synthetic test reports provide a lot of detail on what's causing high LCP, our RUM data tells you how often different element types are responsible for the Largest Contentful Paint.

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