You have been scoring one paint for a journey that has many. The browser can finally tell them apart.
Your LCP stops at the entrance.
For years, single-page and app-shell marketing sites lied politely about speed. The visitor landed. Largest Contentful Paint fired once. Then they clicked Pricing, Docs, or Configure, and the DOM swapped without a full load. Your dashboard still waved the homepage number around as if it described the whole funnel.
That blind spot is closing.
Chrome 151 ships soft-navigation and interaction-contentful-paint on the performance timeline, so the browser can start a new timing origin when a same-document route change is driven by an interaction (Chrome for Developers, Chrome release notes). On August 21, Cloudflare Web Analytics began using that Soft Navigation API where it is available, and falling back to Navigation or History APIs elsewhere, with new navigationType values: soft-navigation and routing-apis (Cloudflare Changelog). Cloudflare is explicit that pageview volume in the dashboard and GraphQL API may rise, and that LCP is missing on the fallback path in Safari, Firefox, and older Chromium.
That is not a lab curiosity. It is a measurement fork.
Split Hard And Soft Before You Argue About Speed
This week, open the RUM you actually trust for the marketing site. If you are on Cloudflare Web Analytics, filter or segment by navigationType. Put hard navigate LCP in one column. Put soft-navigation LCP in another. Do not average them into one green score for the board.
If the site is React, Next app-router client transitions, Vue, or any History API shell, assume most money clicks after the first paint are soft. The page that closes the deal is often the second or third route, not the entrance.
On the engineering side, turn on soft-navigation reporting in your field library where the browser supports it. Chrome's docs map soft-nav LCP through interaction-contentful-paint relative to the soft-navigation start time (Measuring soft navigations). If your library is older than that support, the entrance LCP is still the only number you have, and you should say so out loud.
Pageviews Will Jump. That Is Not Demand.
Cloudflare warns the change may alter reported pageviews. Soft navigations that used to hide inside one session can now count as their own views. A Monday spike after Aug 21 is a definition change until you prove otherwise.
Annotate the date in your analytics notes. Compare week-over-week only inside the same navigationType. If Search Console CrUX and your first-party RUM diverge, write which one the ranking conversation uses (CrUX) and which one the product conversation uses (your RUM with soft navs). Do not let the two argue past each other.
The Operating Move
Pick the three highest-intent routes after the homepage: pricing, demo, configure, docs, or checkout start. Instrument soft-nav LCP on those routes. Fix the worst one before you spend another cycle shaving 50 ms off the entrance hero.
Your LCP stopped at the entrance. The buyer did not.
