First Meaningful Paint

The FMP aims to measure the time between the start of a navigation and the paint after which the biggest above-the-fold layout change has happened and web fonts have loaded.

This metric used to be available in RUM & synthetic monitoring, but has been dropped

The First Meaningful Paint (FMP) metric is the predecessor of the Largest Contentful Paint.

Nuances of the First Meaningful Paint metric

There are some important nuances when it comes to the First Meaningful Paint metric:

  • inconsistent results
    FMP wasn't as straight forward and clear as the LCP metric. So, the FMP metric could vary quite a bit per pageload.
  • FMP preference
    Nevertheless, FMP is considered a better metric by some as the largest element on a page isn't always most important.

So, in some cases, actually knowing the FMP might be convenient. But there is a similar solution offering you more control and more consistent results.

Custom tracking via element timing

A use case is wanting to track the loading or rendering times of elements that aren't an LCP candidate. For example your blog heading, instead of its background image. Nowadays, using element timing is the advised strategy. It's a solution that is often used by site speed experts, where RUMvision offers easy integration.

Continue reading about First Meaningful Paint

As First Meaningful Paint has been deprecated since Lighthouse v6, you might not want to learn more about this metric. Nevertheless, you could read about: