Page-wide image fetchpriority hints and the Core Web Vitals
Default auto priority (99.3%), fetchpriority="high" (34.3%), and fetchpriority="low" (1.6%): how image priority hints are deployed across the web and how they move Largest Contentful Paint.
1.6% of sites use fetchpriority="low" image fetchpriority hints, and 87% of those sites have a good LCP, against 82% of all sites.
LCP pass rate
Sites with fetchpriority="low" image fetchpriority hints have a good LCP most often: 87%, against 82% of all sites. Sites with fetchpriority="high" fetchpriority hints have it least often, at 75%.
Image fetchpriority hints usage
Default auto priority is the most used: 99.3% of sites. Fetchpriority="low" is 1.6% of sites.
How image fetchpriority hints affect the four LCP phases
Across the four LCP sub-parts in Chrome's field data, the largest gap between fetchpriority="low" and fetchpriority="high" sits in time to first byte (TTFB): 489 ms median for fetchpriority="low" against 861 ms for fetchpriority="high". Overall median field LCP is 1.5s for fetchpriority="low" (TTFB 489 ms, load delay 443 ms, load duration 176 ms, render delay 311 ms) versus 1.8s for fetchpriority="high".
Understanding image fetchpriority hints
How fetchpriority="high" and fetchpriority="low" reorder image fetches
In Chromium, <img> requests start at Low priority until layout determines which images sit inside the viewport. Setting fetchpriority="high" (34.3% of sites) elevates the request to High priority during HTML parsing, while setting fetchpriority="low" (1.6% of sites, 87% good LCP) keeps offscreen carousel or thumbnail images from competing with critical resources.
Apply fetchpriority="high" only to the single above-the-fold LCP image, and use fetchpriority="low" on secondary carousel slides or product thumbnails that are fetched early. Across the web, 99.3% of sites have default-priority images (82% good LCP), 34.3% ship at least one fetchpriority="high" image (75% good LCP, heavily concentrated on WordPress), and 1.6% use fetchpriority="low" (87% good LCP).
How image fetchpriority hints plays out per platform
What the field data shows when you isolate a single CMS or framework.
WordPress 65,177 sites WordPress 6.3+ emits fetchpriority="high" on 65.6% of sites (68% good LCP).
WordPress 6.3+ adds fetchpriority="high" to the first large content image with wp_get_loading_optimization_attributes(). Across 65,177 WordPress sites, 65.6% include fetchpriority="high" (68% good LCP) compared with 69% on sites with default priority.
React & Next.js 9,502 sites 79.8% of React sites use fetchpriority="high" (87% good LCP vs 84% with auto priority).
Next.js <Image> emits fetchpriority="high" when priority or fetchPriority="high" is configured. Across 9,502 React sites, 79.8% use fetchpriority="high" (87% good LCP) compared with 84% on sites with default priority.
By Arjen Karel · 210,902 crawled sites (126,761 with phone Chrome field data, 193,893 sites with image fetchpriority hints, October 2026). How we measured.