Today sees the release of my “Preload LCP Image” WordPress Plugin!
In my launch post, I noted that the “Largest contentful Paint” was still a bit too big for my liking. Unfortunately, it’s a bit big still for my liking. However it is a bit better thanks to a “Preload LCP Image” plugin that I wrote.
The problem was that the largest element was not preloaded. Now usually this is the featured image and people have come up with solutions which just preload the featured image. Alas, on my site, this wasn’t the case. In fact if you have a large image on the page that isn’t necessarily a featured image (hello Gutenberg’s cover block!), the current solutions would be rather useless.
Instead of hacking something together to be used for this one instance, I’ve come up with a solution that everybody can use.
In my example, it gives me about a 200ms quicker page. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve already rolled it out to a few clients are on my WordPress maintenance packages and it is having a positive impact on loading times.
Anyway, give it a try! It’s a specific plugin that specifically fixes one such thing, which I prefer for plugins (rather than a one size fits all approach that plugins like Jetpack or the big themes adopt). Stuck? Drop me a message and I’ll see what I can do.