Run a small business site through Google's PageSpeed Insights and eventually you'll hit a term that sounds more complicated than it is: Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP. It's a stopwatch for one specific moment: how long it takes for the biggest thing on the screen, usually a photo, to show up. Google uses it as a real ranking and page-experience signal, not a vanity metric buried in a report nobody reads.
Most of the time, the fix for slow-loading images is the opposite of what you'd expect: load fewer of them right away. That's what lazy loading does. Instead of downloading every photo on a page the second someone lands on it, the browser waits until you scroll close to an image before it bothers fetching it. Every image section in Cantrip, photo grids, galleries, collection cards, service blocks, content blocks, testimonials, ships with that turned on by default, no setting to find or toggle. For the ten photos scattered down a long page, that's exactly right. Nobody needs image eight loaded before they've read a word of your homepage.
Here's the honest catch: lazy loading only helps the images people haven't scrolled to yet. Apply it to the one image sitting at the very top of the page, the thing that's already on screen the moment the page loads, and you've told the browser to wait on the exact image Google is timing for LCP. The page ends up scoring worse because of the same default meant to make it score better.
Most Cantrip homepages dodge this without trying. Open a page with a Banner section and that hero photo is a CSS background image under the hood, not a regular image tag, so the lazy-loading behavior never applies to it. It just paints. That's not a deliberate speed feature so much as a side effect of how banners are built, but it works out.
Where this costs you: pages that open with something other than a banner. Lead with a Gallery, a Photo Grid, a Content Block, or a Collection Card section instead, and that first photo gets the same loading="lazy" treatment as every other image on the page, right as it's also the biggest thing visible the moment the page loads. A photographer's portfolio page that opens straight into a gallery, or an artist's homepage built around one big content block image, are the two easiest ways to land here.
There's no per-image toggle in the editor for this yet, so the honest answer is: know when it matters. If you're chasing a specific PageSpeed or Lighthouse score, check what section opens your page. Banner up top, you're fine. Gallery or photo section up top, that's the one spot where Cantrip's normal, sensible default works against you instead of for you. If nobody on your team is staring at a Lighthouse report and your actual visitors find you just fine, this isn't something to lose sleep over. A few hundred milliseconds on a Core Web Vitals score rarely decides whether a real customer picks up the phone.
On WordPress, chasing this down usually means digging through two or three caching and lazy-load plugins, half of which fight each other, to find the one setting quietly overriding the other. On Cantrip it's one honest fact about one section type. Worth knowing, not worth panicking over.