While working at WP Rocket I saw so many Elementor customers struggling with a slow LCP metric, especially on mobile, due to their full-width “hero” images.
These full-width images at the top of the page often have text or other elements positioned over them, so most of the time this effect is accomplished in Elementor by using a background image on the container element.
While this looks great on the frontend of the site, it can often be damaging for the LCP score.
PageSpeed is a useful tool for certain metrics but it lacks some specific details.
Using a tool that shows you a waterfall chart can give you a different angle on performance. GTMetrix, Webpagetest.org and DebugBear are examples of tools that provide a waterfall chart.
What’s a waterfall chart?
The waterfall chart shows a list of every file that your website loads, in the order that those requests are made.
So it pulls back the curtain and gives you a peek at what’s going on behind the scenes when someone visits your site in their browser. It helps you find bottlenecks, errors and other performance issues.
The LCP Request Discovery recommendation in PageSpeed helps you to improve the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric on your page.
The LCP element is the biggest piece of content above the fold on your page. It could be an image, a piece of text or a video. In PageSpeed, the request discovery audit is related to images.
In the Site Health section of your WordPress site you might see the warning:
Autoloaded options could affect performance
This is related to the options that themes and plugins request on every page load of your site. If there are too many, it will slow down the load time of the page. The Site Health warning triggers when the options are above 800kb.
A common pain point amongst new users of Block Themes is managing homepage content – how and where to edit it and if that should be done in the template itself.
The problem with some block themes is that they put their demo content directly into the template. This can override whatever content you set to show on your homepage. And if you don’t know better, you’ll start editing the template to add your own content.
Full site editing is the new direction that WordPress is heading in, to provide a better editing and design experience for site owners.
To get familiar with the new terminology that comes along with Full Site Editing, please read the glossary.
You have likely already used the block editor, formerly known as Gutenberg. It’s been the default editor since WordPress 5.0.