First Meaningful Paint is a measurement of when a user is able to view the most important part of a webpage.

This is important for marketers as users will lose interest if they do not get their content delivered to them in a quick & efficient manner. 

Why First Meaningful Paint Is Important To Search Engine Optimization & User Experience

When a user accesses a piece of web content, they expect it to load in a timely manner.

The longer it takes to see solid progress in a page’s loading sequence, the less likely a user is going to trust the content, much less wait around for it to load.

When this happens, they are not willing to wait & will go seek their answers to their queries somewhere else, losing you website traffic & conversions.

When a bot is accessing your site content to index it, they have a similar experience (although they aren’t going to bounce necessarily).

If a bot perceives content taking too long to render in a user’s browser window, they will assume that it is poor quality & rank other, faster loading content above it.

This makes it essential to streamline all content in your pages’ loading sequences in a way that brings content to the forefront immediately & is able to be interacted with.

Some ways to do this include using Lazy Loading for files not needed above the fold, as well as to compress all files needed above the fold to load as fast as possible.