How to reduce LCP score without changing hosting?

  • Unknown's avatar
    tamaramin9 · Member ·

    Hi everyone,

    I’m working on improving the Core Web Vitals of my website, OAKS Wellness Water, and the biggest issue I’m facing is a high Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score.

    Unfortunately, changing the hosting provider isn’t an option right now, so I’m looking for other ways to improve LCP.

    So far, I’ve tried:

    • Image optimization and WebP conversion
    • Caching plugin configuration
    • Minifying CSS and JavaScript
    • Lazy loading images

    The LCP element is usually the hero image or above-the-fold content.

    What additional techniques have you found effective for reducing LCP without upgrading hosting?

    Has anyone tested similar approaches, or are there other recommendations that worked for you?

    Thanks in advance for your insights!

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-godofredo · Staff ·

    Hi @tamaramin9! I’ve taken a look at your OAKS Wellness Water site and spotted a few things that are likely contributing to the high LCP score. Let me walk through them.

    Outdated and unused plugins

    Your Elementor Pro plugin is on version 3.35.1, and the current version is 4.1.2. That’s a full major version behind, and performance improvements are often included in those updates. Updating both Elementor and Elementor Pro could make a noticeable difference on its own.

    Remember that WordPress.com Business plan include Staging sites and real-time backups, which are great for instances like these. 

    I’d also recommend checking your active plugins, and deactivating anything you aren’t currently using. That includes plugins like All-in-One WP Migration 

    Potential plugin conflicts

    You have both Elementor Pro and Pro Elements active. Pro Elements is a GPL fork of Elementor Pro, and running both means double the CSS and JavaScript loading on every page. Keeping only the one your site is actually using and deactivating the other could significantly reduce page weight.

    You also have two code injection plugins active: Easy Code Manager and Insert Headers and Footers (WPCode). Both inject code into your pages, so consolidating to just one reduces the risk of extra render-blocking scripts.

    Performance plugin: consider Jetpack Boost

    You mentioned configuring a caching plugin, and I can see WP Rocket is currently active. You might want to try Jetpack Boost as an alternative. It’s a free performance plugin built by the same team behind WordPress.com, and it handles Critical CSS generation, JavaScript deferral, image CDN, page caching, CSS/JS concatenation, and even has a newer LCP Image Optimization feature that targets the largest image on your homepage.

    You would want to deactivate WP Rocket before activating Boost to avoid conflicts between the two. 

    Your hero image setup

    Looking at your homepage, the hero section’s main image is set as a CSS background image through Elementor rather than as a standard image element. This matters because browsers can’t preload or prioritize background images the same way they can a standard image, which means the browser discovers it later in the loading process and delays your LCP.

    Finally, you can run your site through the WordPress.com Performance Profiler to get a breakdown of what’s contributing most to your load time and track your progress as you make changes.

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