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Crawlmind
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Rule page.performance.fcp-slow

Speed up First Contentful Paint (FCP)

page.performance.fcp-slow is a check in Crawlmind's site audit that grades medium-impact issues of this kind. This page explains why the rule matters and the exact fix.

Impact: mediumEffort: medium

Why it matters

FCP is the moment any content first appears on screen. Google's "good" threshold is under 1.8s at the 75th percentile. Slow FCP means users stare at a blank page: they abandon, and the page reads as "broken" to Lighthouse and Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data Google ranks against.

The fix

FCP is mostly a "remove blockers" problem:

1. **Inline critical CSS** so the browser can paint without waiting for the external stylesheet.
2. **Defer non-critical JS** with `<script defer>` or `type="module"`.
3. **Preconnect to required origins** (analytics, fonts, CDN) so the TCP handshake overlaps with HTML parsing:

```html
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="https://analytics.example.com">
```

4. **Compress HTML** with gzip/brotli at the edge.
5. **Drop above-the-fold third-party scripts** (chat widgets, A/B testing): they push FCP back by their full fetch + parse time.

References