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Slow loading pages

Silktide loads your pages in a real browser and measures how long the main content takes to appear on screen. This uses the industry-standard measure called Largest Contentful Paint, which times when the largest image or block of text becomes visible.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of Google's . It reflects what people naturally experience as "the page has loaded" better than older measures such as waiting for every file to finish downloading.

Why this matters

Visitors judge your website in the first seconds. Pages whose main content is slow to appear lose visitors before they read anything: study after study links each extra second of loading to measurably higher abandonment, especially on mobile. Because LCP is a Core Web Vital, slow pages can also rank lower in search results, so a slow page loses both the visitors it gets and some it never gets.

How to fix it

Silktide shows you which element on the page is the largest - that element is what you need to make appear sooner.

  1. If it is an image, make it smaller and faster: compress it, use a modern format, and serve it at the displayed size - see Image optimisation. Never the main image.
  2. Remove or defer anything that delays rendering, such as stylesheets and scripts that block the page - see Render-blocking resources.
  3. Speed up the server's first response, since everything else waits for the - caching and a both help.

How Silktide tests this

  1. Load the page in a real browser and measure the Largest Contentful Paint time in milliseconds.
  2. Identify which element was the largest at that moment, and show it to you.
  3. Grade the result using the standard LCP thresholds: up to 2.5 seconds is good, and anything over 4 seconds is considered poor.

Troubleshooting

The page feels faster than the measurement suggests

LCP measures a first visit with an empty , which is what a new visitor experiences. Your own repeat visits reuse cached files and feel much faster.

The largest element isn't the important one

LCP times whichever element is largest, typically a hero image or headline. If an incidental element (such as a background image) is your LCP, speeding it up still speeds up what visitors perceive, because everything painting around it benefits from the same fixes.

Learn more

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