thread Re: Slow loading LCP, etc hurting Seo in Online Store

Slow loading LCP, etc hurting Seo

jerwgar — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:09:17 GMT

Wondering what others' experience is with loading speeds for google seo. I did a scan of my site, bwpoke.com, on diib and it said LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) was 22.2 seconds, they recommend not over 2.5, also First Contentful Paint, speed to active, and Time to Interactive were very slow. When I turned off vpn, it might be 5 seconds faster on LCP, but it was another scanning service, so I am not sure. I wonder what might cause that. Pictures are optimized to be square, but they might still be too big. Favorites have to sync from the menu and items? With vpn, you get a "verify you are human" screen, but it was still very slow without it. Is it likely baked into the programming for the Square site editor, their hosting, or something else I can change?

Re: Slow loading LCP, etc hurting Seo

TheRealChipA — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:27:28 GMT

Hey there @jerwgar. Do you have videos or other multi-media objects on your website/store? If so, these are usually the culprit for long LCPs. The first time I noticed lengths like that on my Square site was when I added an animated logo to my home page (which you can see there now). That fact tells me that Square's page building elements are pretty optimized already, and that this is more about content that you/we have added. Besides videos, background images and SVG files of any kind are often guilty of slowing things down noticeably.

Here's a link to a.helpful article that lists various possible solutions. I created a CloudFlare account and added my site to that, which solved my problem immediately. Your results may differ, of course, depending on the complexity of your site. But that would be my first suggestion. Also, there are other solutions spelled out in that article which might apply to you.

Re: Slow loading LCP, etc hurting Seo

Minion — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:17:32 GMT

+1 On Cloudflare. It's a free account, and a pretty straightforward setup. Like Chip mentioned, the results are instant once you purge your site.

Re: Slow loading LCP, etc hurting Seo

jerwgar — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 23:17:10 GMT

I switched to Cloudflare, and it went from 22 LCP to 17. I deleted every major element one at a time to see if any were making things slow, even favorites synced from the menu, and it made no difference to LCP time. No videos, just two pictures, logo, google map, 6 sinked menu favorites and text. Really a pretty simple page so it doesn't make sense.

Re: Slow loading LCP, etc hurting Seo

jerwgar — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 23:18:04 GMT

That did help, went from LCP of 22 to 17.