Your website loads in under two seconds. Your Lighthouse score sits comfortably in the green. Yet, your real-world users are bouncing, and your organic rankings are slipping.

The shift from treating performance as a binary “speed” metric to a faceted “experience” evaluation represents the most significant change in search strategy over the last decade.

In the world of Core Web Vitals, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is the metric that keeps developers up at night. It is the most volatile, the hardest to debug, and arguably the most critical for user perception.