The Big Picture

One of the most important performance metrics we have for determining how quickly we get meaningful content onto the screen for our site's visitors is the Largest Contentful Paint. Improving this metric, as it turns out, goes hand in hand with understanding image loading — just under 75% of all Largest Contentful Paint’s are triggered by images or background images, and the way those images are loaded has a dramatic impact.

Let’s talk about how browsers load images today, common approaches that are slowing us down today, the techniques we have to make things faster and what we can do to make sure that we’re not just optimizing for a single browser engine along the way.