Loading times are important and remain key to the success of a website. After all, what kind of user wants to wait for a long time to view a post or video they searched for? The LCP, or “Largest Contentful Paint,” metric indicates the “render time” of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport, relative to when the page first started loading.
What is the value of a good LCP? To ensure a good user experience, websites should have a “Largest Contentful Paint” value of 2.5 seconds or less. Keep in mind that websites often load in stages. For this reason, it is possible that the largest elements on a page might change. There are other facts, metrics and data that could be mentioned. However, metrics are often complex, difficult to explain or even misleading.
What Do We Focus on When Building Our Sites?
We pay attention to all the details to be implemented (those that are feasible) and revise and rework whenever possible. It is the many “small steps” that make a difference. Our main focus is the creation of user-friendly texts that connect with their target groups as well as possible. This applies to blogs, vlogs, videos and company pages. If products, content and services are described effectively and visitors on our sites recognise their value, benefit from this and implement projects with us, then we have done our job well. Investing in precision, security, reliability and, as far as possible, in speed is worth it. There are, of course, certain limitations. Nevertheless, “step-by-step” approaches and know-how make a difference.
Multilingual Content and Sites
We have seen the benefits of taking a flexible linguistic approach on our sites. The joy of writing allows us to “capture” as much as possible. The success of this has been seen year on year. The speed and the evaluations made are improving. Incorporating another language allows you to reflect and guarantees continual, standard revisions. In this way, mistakes can be avoided and solutions, ideas and approaches can be found. This creates additional value, including for our readers. Those who write explore many topics more deeply. After “downloading” your thoughts in written form, you need to arrange, categorise, catalogue, systematise and structure them. This immersion, this attempt to describe resilience, solutions relating to habits and everyday problems serves us on a personal level and enables a pleasant exchange with readers, whose feedback could not be more varied. In short, “if you want something good to happen, just do it!” This is how we continually improve the quality and comprehensibility of our texts, as well as the keyword density and the corresponding relevance. Readers’ feedback is not the only confirmation we have of these improvements. We use the tool “Grammarly” for everyday communication in English, as well as various texts. This may add to the workflow; however, it obliges us to assess the linguistic demands and carry out appropriate edits and checks.
Cloudflare: A Few Insights
Our sites are optimised using “Cloudflare”. This allows us to enhance loading times and security and also ensures multifaceted and continual checks, tests and, where necessary, deletions. With an ever-increasing range of possibilities comes a need for continuous training. The scope for estimations is getting larger. “Cloudflare,” with its multitude of management tools, plays a significant role. Having said that, we do not use every service offered by “Cloudflare,” not least due to cost reasons. It is crucial to consider what you want to implement and what you can do without. The aim is to avoid wasting time and effort wherever possible.
Our Technical Experience and Services in Relation to LCP and Improvements in Usability
Images and videos are optimised directly on our site without much use of “Cloudflare”. We recognised that “Lazy Loading” settings with an increased emphasis on LCP did not improve the user experience; the first few texts did load faster, but the user had to wait longer, which search engines are increasingly able to recognise and assess. We have seen good results with video links when using the “Embed Video Facade” feature, particularly with sites that have several videos on the home page. With this feature, videos are not loaded until they are clicked on. The thumbnail is initially loaded and displayed. On pages that have no videos or only a few of them, we do not use “Lazy Loading” or “Embed Video Facade”. Instead, we optimise the images for the WebP format. As we use many images on our sites, we also continually consider using “Viewport Progressive Images”. These two image optimisation techniques are an essential component of our website solutions. When using “Cloudflare” for image optimisation, errors can occur that can be avoided using the configuration described. Moreover, with this approach, the costs for performant sites can be minimised, even when many high-quality images and videos are used. Naturally, limitations need to be considered, particularly when the number of users is increasing, more data constantly need to be transmitted and you enter the domain of streaming and image hosting. At that point, increasing turnover and profit becomes relevant. Costs and the level of effort required need to be constantly monitored in order to be able to respond appropriately in each situation. Scaling is usually less of a problem. Instead, the challenge is cost reduction and the corresponding restructuring.
