If you own a site or online store with lots of content or products, search is vital to ensure that your visitors find what they need quickly. For example, people on eCommerce sites are 2x more likely to purchase something when they search.

It’s not enough just to have a search box on your site; the quality of the search results can make or break your visitors’ experience. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for right away, chances are they will go elsewhere, and you will miss out on that purchase or engagement with your site.

The search experience you get out of the box with a self-hosted WordPress site is pretty basic. It is primarily designed to search over your blog and page archives; you either get a hit with your search or don’t.

We strongly recommend using a dedicated plugin like Jetpack Search for your site or store’s search experience.

Measuring a website’s user experience (UX) can be a tough challenge. But that’s what Google’s attempting to do with the Core Web Vitals metrics. And scoring well on these is important because Google weighs user experience when determining search engine rankings. 

There are several metrics that are part of Core Web Vitals, and they could sound a bit intimidating. The good news is that there are several tools that make it easier to understand your score and how to improve. 

In this article, we’ll look at one particular metric: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This measures how long it takes your website to load the largest element that you see on the screen. 

We’ll discuss how it impacts the user experience and what causes a poor LCP score. Then, we’ll show you how to improve it.