Felix Arntz explains how it was recently discovered that the current WordPress core implementation might regress the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric “when hero images above the fold are being lazy-loaded.”
Felix notes the adjustments for WordPress 5.9 will likely have just the very first content image or content iframe not be lazy-loaded. (Featured images are also being considered.)
This will become the default and should result in better LCP performance for WordPress “out of the box” while leaving more granular control to theme authors so they can decide which elements should be lazy-loaded.
