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First Contentful Paint (FCP)

First Contentful Paint is the moment something first appears on the screen after a visitor opens a page: a line of text, a logo, an image. Until then, they look at a blank page or at the page they came from, and can’t tell whether anything is happening.

Why it matters

Section titled “Why it matters”

The first visible content is the first sign that the page is loading. When it comes quickly, visitors are willing to wait for the rest. When the screen stays blank for several seconds, many give up before the page has a chance to show what it offers.

FCP marks only the start. The first thing on the screen may be a menu or a cookie notice, not the content the visitor came for; that’s what Largest Contentful Paint measures.

What influences it

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Cache: The most common cause of a slow FCP on WordPress sites is a missing page cache. Nothing can appear before the server sends the first part of the page, and without a cache, WordPress builds every page from scratch first. See Time to First Byte.

Browser: Before drawing anything, the browser loads every stylesheet in the head of the page and runs scripts that aren’t marked to wait. Each plugin that adds its own stylesheet or script there adds to this wait. Web fonts can keep text invisible until they’ve loaded, unless the theme lets the browser show a fallback font first.

Server: A slow or overloaded server delays the first response for every page that isn’t served from a cache.

Network: Redirects, looking up the domain name and setting up the secure connection all happen before the first byte arrives. Stylesheets and fonts from other servers need their own connection.

CDN: A CDN serves the page and its stylesheets from a location close to the visitor, which shortens every round trip before the first paint.

In Permo

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Permo shows FCP on its PageSpeed page in the lab values for Mobile and Desktop and, when Google has data, in the Real users section: the value that 75% of Chrome visits reached or beat over the last 28 days.

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Sources