FIRST CONTENTFUL PAINT OF TOP 500 MOST POPULAR WEBSITES

Your website's performance can make or break your business. Faster loading times directly impact user engagement and conversion rates, making it essential for any tech leader aiming for success.

First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a performance metric that measures the time from navigation to the time when the browser renders the first bit of content that is interesting to the user. It is an important metric for user experience and SEO. According to Google Developers, the ideal FCP value is less than 1.8 seconds. Websites that have FCP values higher than 3 seconds are considered to have poor performance. Below is a histogram of FCP values for top 500 most popular websites from moz.com. The data was collected using a web automation script that controlled and monitored web browser via Chrome DevTools Protocol.

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As you can see, the FCP values vary significantly. The median FCP is around 0.5 seconds, but there are websites with FCP values exceeding 5 seconds. Vast majority of sites has FCP below 1.8s as recommended by Google. What about websites, which have FCP over 1.8s? Some of them may just use client-side rendering with fetch requests to servers that are far away from geolocation where tests were run. The list of websites with FCP over 1.8s is presented in the embedded Python notebook below.

As you can see, the list of websites with FCP over 1.8s is quite long. If we discard the websites, which probably have distant servers, we are left with pretty interesting results:

• https://www.over-blog.com
• https://outlook.com
• https://wiley.com
• https://imageshack.us
• https://amzn.to
• https://developers.google.com
• https://brandbucket.com
• https://go.co
• https://change.org
• https://namecheap.com
• https://live.com
• https://icann.org
• https://samsung.com
• https://imdb.com
• https://aliexpress.com
• https://disney.com

Yeees. You see it right. Google Developers is on this list. The site, which states that FCP should be below 1.8s for optimal user experience. I guess developers just may be a different audience, perhaps more patient?

Google has even created a web application for website diagnostics, where we can confirm the results.

The diagnostic tool include suggestions on how to improve the performance:

With all that, there remains only one thing left to say:

Google, please fix your website. It is slow!

You can always ask me for help.