First Contentful Paint (FCP)
First Contentful Paint measures the time from opening a page to the first visibly rendered content element, such as text, an image, an SVG or a canvas. Google rates a value of up to 1.8 seconds as good, up to 3 seconds as in need of improvement and anything beyond that as poor. FCP is not an official Core Web Vital, but it complements LCP, INP and CLS as an additional loading indicator.
In practice
In practice FCP is a good early indicator of how quickly people perceive any response from the page at all – unlike LCP, which measures the largest and often most important content, FCP shows only the first content pixel – text, an image, an SVG or a canvas; a mere change of background colour does not count. Typical brakes are render-blocking CSS and JavaScript in the ``, large uncached font files, or a slow server (see TTFB) that delays the first response. Google uses FCP as one of several metrics in Lighthouse and the Chrome UX Report, but does not weight it directly in Core Web Vitals – improving LCP usually improves FCP automatically, since both are affected by the same rendering blockers.