What Sydney Businesses Need to Know About LCP

When a potential customer lands on your website, you have just a few seconds to make a good impression. In a market as competitive as Sydney, slow-loading pages quickly drive visitors away. This is where Sydney SEO optimisation services become critical. Not just for rankings, but for ensuring your site loads quickly and delivers a smooth experience. 

Google measures this through Core Web Vitals, a set of performance signals designed to reflect real user experience. Among them, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) stands out as one of the most critical metrics.

Simply put, LCP measures how long it takes for the important piece of content, usually a hero image or a big block of text, to become visible on the screen. For businesses, a fast LCP is a direct line to holding a visitor's attention, reducing bounce rates, and ultimately, improving your search engine rankings. A slow LCP tells both users and Google that your site offers a frustrating experience.

What Lazy Loading Is and How It Impacts LCP

Imagine moving into a new flat. Instead of unpacking everything at once, you start with the essentials: the kettle, your toothbrush, and bed linen. The rest, books, winter clothes, and decorations, stay packed until you need them. That’s how lazy loading works on a website. The browser loads only what’s immediately visible on the screen, holding back images, videos, and other elements until the user scrolls to them.

This technique has clear benefits. It speeds up the initial load by prioritising content at the top, creating a smoother user experience. It also saves data, which is especially helpful for mobile users and image-heavy sites like e-commerce stores or photography portfolios.

But problems occur when lazy loading is applied to content that appears above the fold, such as a hero image. In that case, the browser initially ignores the very element Google and users care about most. It only fetches it later, delaying its display and hurting your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score. Instead of speeding things up, misused lazy loading makes the page feel sluggish and undermines the user experience it was meant to improve.

What Google’s Experts Have Said About Lazy Loading and LCP

Google itself is obvious on this topic. The official advice in Google Search Central's guidelines explicitly warns against lazy loading above-the-fold images. It’s a common mistake that their systems see all the time, directly impacting how their ranking algorithms perceive a site.

Google's own experts, like John Mueller, have repeatedly pointed out this misstep. He and others have explained that Google's crawlers assess a page based on its rendered HTML. This is a crucial distinction, as it is not just about looking at a static screenshot of the page but about having a page that is constructed and displayed in a browser, just as a real user would see it.

Native Lazy Loading vs. Third-Party Libraries

There are two main ways to implement lazy loading on a website. The first is native lazy loading, which is now built directly into modern web browsers. It’s as simple as adding a small piece of code (`loading="lazy"`) to an image tag. It's easy, reliable, and supported by Google. The browser itself intelligently decides when to load the image based on how close the user is to scrolling it into view.

The second method involves using third-party JavaScript libraries. These have been around for much longer than native lazy loading and can sometimes offer more customisation. However, they come with risks. Because they rely on extra JavaScript files, they can add complexity and another potential point of failure. If the script is buggy, blocked, or slow to load, it can prevent your images from loading at all. 

For Sydney businesses, relying on a poorly maintained or improperly configured JavaScript library can sometimes lead to indexing issues where Google struggles to see your images, hurting both your SEO and user experience.

Practical Fixes for Sydney Businesses

Fixing LCP issues caused by lazy loading doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require a technical eye. The main objective is to make sure your most important content, usually the hero image or banner at the top of the page, loads immediately and efficiently. Here are some fixes Sydney businesses can apply with the help of technical SEO services:

First, exclude above-the-fold content from lazy loading. Hero images, banners, or primary text blocks should use eager loading (loading="eager") or be excluded from lazy-loading scripts entirely. Many CMS platforms allow you to exempt the first one or two images automatically.

Second, optimise how those images are delivered. Use modern formats like WebP or AVIF, compress files without losing quality, and ensure they’re served through a Content Delivery Network (CDN). For high-resolution images, consider responsive srcset attributes so smaller devices don’t waste time downloading unnecessarily large files.

Third, preconnect and preload critical assets. By adding <link rel="preload"> for your hero image or fonts in the <head> of your page, you signal to the browser to fetch them immediately, shaving off valuable milliseconds in LCP timing. Pairing this with proper caching headers keeps repeat visits fast.

Fourth, always declare image dimensions in your HTML or CSS. This prevents layout shifts and gives the browser a reserved space for rendering, improving both LCP and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Finally, verify improvements with the right tools. Use Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. For deeper insight, check the “Rendered HTML” in Search Console to confirm lazy-loading libraries aren’t blocking critical elements.

These minor but technical adjustments can transform how fast your site feels for users, and with Sydney SEO optimisation services monitoring Core Web Vitals, you’ll safeguard both rankings and user trust.

How Technical SEO Services Can Help

Diagnosing and fixing LCP issues can feel overwhelming, especially when you're busy running your business. This is where a professional technical SEO audit becomes invaluable. A thorough audit goes beyond keywords and content, diving deep into the technical foundation of your website to uncover issues that are holding you back, like aforementioned improper lazy loading.

A comprehensive audit can pinpoint exactly which render-blocking resources, oversized image payloads, or misconfigured JavaScript lazy-loading libraries are delaying your LCP. It also evaluates factors like server response times (TTFB), critical CSS delivery, and whether preloading and preconnect directives are being applied effectively.

From there, a clear optimisation roadmap is built, covering asset compression, CDN configuration, and Core Web Vitals monitoring. For many Sydney businesses, this is the difference between a site that converts and one that frustrates. Investing in technical SEO services is about creating a better, faster experience for your customers, which leads to higher engagement, more conversions, and improved user satisfaction.

Getting Sydney SEO Optimisation Services to stay Ahead with Healthy LCP

Lazy loading is a powerful tool for improving website performance, but it’s not a solution that fixes everything. When applied correctly to below-the-fold content, it speeds up your site and reduces data usage. When misapplied to above-the-fold elements, it harms your LCP score, damages user experience, and weakens your ability to rank on Google.

If you’re ready to improve your site speed, safeguard rankings, and make the best possible first impression online, SEO Growth is here to help. Contact us today to see how we can optimise your LCP and deliver meaningful growth for your business.