First Contentful Paint

First Contentful Paint (FCP) is the time it takes the browser to render the first real piece of content — a text or an image — on the screen after loading begins.

FCP is the first signal that tells the user “the page is coming,” so it shapes the initial sense of speed, but it should not be confused with LCP: FCP measures the first content pixel while LCP measures the largest above-the-fold element, which is why a page can have a good FCP yet a poor LCP. FCP is not a Core Web Vital but a supporting Web Vital useful for spotting render-side slowness. Its thresholds are good up to 1.8 s, needs-improvement up to 3 s, and poor beyond that. Because it is counted from navigation start, it also contains network and server time; if FCP is high but server response is short, the root cause is rendering and render-blocking scripts, not the network.