Google failing all Pro-generated pages on Core Web Vitals due to high LCP, please help!

[amardeepmisha]

Hello Themeco team,

The Google Search Console is failing ALL pages of our site on all metrics related to Experience. The root cause is that the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is more than 2.5 seconds for every page. We have done everything we can to fine tune our servers etc. We are being told by Google support that this is an issue with the “Wordpress theme we are using”. It seems that others are experiencing this problem too after some recent Pro releases. See Lighthouse VS Pro.

As I hope you will appreciate, this is a very serious problem. If Pro is going to lead to poor Google ranking, we will not be able to use it any more. We love your products (currently using Pro) and have used them for several projects for more than 5 years. We hope to continue to use Pro. So, I hope your team will address this issue with the seriousness that it deserves. I have provided more information in the secure note and I am happy to connect our tech team if you need more information via a phone call as well as happy to engage you for custom consulting if that is necessary. But we need a resolution to this problem.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Pagespeed test results for a very simple test page:

[christian]

Hey @amardeepmisha.

Slow page speed is a problem for sure.

It is not our theme that is the cause of LCP. LCP measures the content and not the theme. At first glance and if you only focus on the element, you will think that it’s our theme that is causing the issue because the report points to an element outputted by the builder. But, it’s actually, “the content” which is slow. You’re using a Google Font which the browser will take time to download.

To add some proof that our theme is not the cause of LCP, I tested just a little content still using our theme and builder and the result of LCP of the page is good. That is even using a Google Font.

I’d like to add that the moment you’ll change the text properties like the font size, color, etc…, it will add up to the rendering work of the browser therefore increasing the LCP time. Check the following screenshots.

It would be on you to optimize the LCP. This article might help.

The Google support is just partly correct in that resources like styles are loaded in the head and that is recorded as blocking resource. You might be able to get around with that by doing our guide tutorial here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WqXHfJ719g

Hope that helps.

[amardeepmisha]

@christian,

Thanks for your reply. I have removed everything from the test page except the text “Hello World”. A simple page like this should pass Google’s LCP test with flying colors but this page does not.

Clearly that is a serious problem for us. We will go through the links you have provided and implement those optimizations.

Since you have tested a page that passed the LCP test, can you provide a link to it so that our developers can analyze further what is different between your test and our test page? I will appreciate it if you can provide guidance on anything that we may be doing wrong with the Pro Theme (such as incorrect theme settings, overuse of Fonts, etc.) that is making our pages fail on the simplest of content? Since you are able to use Google Fonts on your test page and yet have it pass the LCP test, Google Fonts may not be the root cause.

Furthermore, if you are saying that even minimal text formatting (i.e. changing properties like font size, color, etc.) will cause the LCP to shoot up then that is a problem with the Pro architecture. Text formatting is a basic features of any content site and should not cause a site to lose Google ranking. I would strongly urge your development team to look into this concern seriously and not ignore it.

I appreciate your help, thank you!

[friech]

Hi @amardeepmisha,

Here’s a simple test, links below. We know Largest Contentful Paint is the largest content on the page commonly an image. So I took the two LCP on your home page and tested them on my dev site. And here’s the result.

Test page 1, images are not optimized (https://i.imgur.com/VjZSAFw.png). Considering I did not do any optimization on the site nor server (no caching or anything), 87 is quite high.

Now here’s a Test page 2, it’s basically the same page, but the image here is optimized using tinypng (https://i.imgur.com/mNiXgSf.png), LCP is still 1.2s but it’s now more than acceptable (green) because of the higher speed index, it gets a higher score. I intentionally leave the header and footer on this page to see if it’s going to affect the score but it seems not.

So it’s not true that all page built-in PRO is failing with performance test, it’s not the theme that is causing the LCP to be loaded slowly on a page, it has a lot of factors, one way to help the browser quickly download the resources is by optimizing it.

Thanks,

[amardeepmisha]

@friech,

Thank you for your reply.

I am confused by the information you have provided. I performed Google’s PageSpeed Insight test on the two pages you have created. I get a PageSpeed result of 26 (extremely poor) for Test page 2 and a result of 61 (mediocre in general but for such a simple page this is a poor result) for Test page 1 (see images below). The LCP is also worse for Test Page 2 (7.1 s) compared to that for Test Page 1 (5.8 sec). The results are the opposite of what you are saying — Test page 2 performance is worse, not better and both of these are poor results, particularly for such trivially simple pages. If these are the results with simple pages that you have created then there clearly a serious performance problem with Pro in its current release. We urgently need to get to the bottom of the problem and determine how we can resolve this problem. We are using Pro in production and this bug is negatively impacting our search rankings.

Is it possible for me to speak to someone by phone in your executive or technical team to discuss this further? I can arrange for our technical team to be present on the call as well to brainstorm. We are happy to work with your team in a paid consulting engagement (if necessary) but we need to get to the bottom of this problem and solve it for our mutual benefit — and for the benefit of all other Pro users. Again, I am grateful for your help and will appreciate if you can escalate my concern to the appropriate people.

PageSpeed Insight result for your Test Page 1 (with nothing except 2 images)

PageSpeed Insight result for your Test Page 2 (with optimized images but includling header and footer)

Thanks you.

[christian]

Hey @amardeepmisha,

I’d like to go back to your previous responses first because it is very important that you understand LCP. There are lots of things to optimize in a site both within our theme and your content but please let us focus on LCP for this thread.

@amardeepmisha

I have removed everything from the test page except the text “Hello World”. A simple page like this should pass Google’s LCP test with flying colors but this page does not.

• Yes I understand that you have very minimal content. My previous tests are minimal too and yet I have both passed and failed the LCP by Google for just increasing the font size. And yes, Google Font might not be the cause of the low LCP score but it still should be tested so we don’t guess.

@amardeepmisha

if you are saying that even minimal text formatting (i.e. changing properties like font size, color, etc.) will cause the LCP to shoot up then that is a problem with the Pro architecture. Text formatting is a basic features of any content site and should not cause a site to lose Google ranking. I would strongly urge your development team to look into this concern seriously and not ignore it.

• This does not mean our theme has architectural issues. Our theme just outputs HTML just like any other themes. For proof, run this page in Page Insights http://dev-pro2.pantheonsite.io/. That site is using 2021 default WordPress theme. A very simple theme but yet Google scores the LCP low.

You will need to experiment to pass the LCP specifically for your site. You can see below that LCP is not because of any theme but your content. It’s not necessarily an image like what my colleague said. The screenshot of the report below is clearly not an image. It’s just 1 line of text. We’re sorry for the confusion. Here’s the description from Google.

The end goal of LCP report is you optimize what Google sees as slow to paint on your page. You need to optimize that until Google is satisfied. Again, this does not mean the theme is causing the issue.

@amardeepmisha

If these are the results with simple pages that you have created then there clearly a serious performance problem with Pro in its current release. We urgently need to get to the bottom of the problem and determine how we can resolve this problem. We are using Pro in production and this bug is negatively impacting our search rankings.

• I’ve proven that this is not a theme issue. This is a matter of optimizing your content. This is not a bug. The LCP issue can happen to ANY theme and even beyond WordPress because it looks at the content setup.

@amardeepmisha

Is it possible for me to speak to someone by phone in your executive or technical team to discuss this further?

Regretfully, we don’t have phone support. What I can do is relay your message to our development team. Just note that we can’t guarantee an immediate response.

Hope that helps and thank you for understanding.

[amardeepmisha]

@christian thanks a lot for your detailed and thoughtful reply. I will share this with our development team and circle back to you with their results or any questions.

[tristup]

Hi @amardeepmisha,

Glad that we are able to help you with this.

Thanks