Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a metric that makes up the Google Search Console Core Web Vitals report for evaluating the user experience on a page. The INP measures the time between one interaction and another that the user made on the page, and will indicate the longest interaction.
In , “INP observes the latency of all interactions a user has made with the page, and reports a single value which all (or nearly all) interactions were below. A low INP means the page was consistently able to respond quickly to all—or the vast majority—of user interactions.”
And what are the INP values that Google considers good or bad?
- Good: below 200 milliseconds
- Needs improvement: between 200 and 500 milliseconds
- Bad: Above 500 milliseconds
Replacement: INP enters, FID leaves
To explain the reason for the change, there’s no action fairer than giving a voice to the Google Chrome team.
“While it did improve the way we measure responsiveness, FID wasn’t without limitations. The name itself actually gives away two such limitations: “first input” and “delay”. FID only reports the responsiveness of the first time a user interacts with the page. Even though Cambodia Mobile Number List first impressions are important, the first interaction is not necessarily representative of all interactions throughout the life of a page. Further, FID only measures the input delay portion of the first interaction, which is the amount of time the browser had to wait (due to main thread busyness) before even beginning to handle the interaction.”
Rick Viscomi, DevRel Engineer at Google
Do you understand the progress here? If today it is possible to say that your website is great in terms of UX through the FID, tomorrow it will be even more accurate with the INP. After all, we are expanding measurement to all interactions. Fair enough, isn’t it?
Now Google will force us to ensure good interactions at all times and that’s great! So, let’s now understand what’s needed to optimize your website by March 2024.
Optimize for INP!
According to Google, these are the best practices for you to optimize your site for INP:
Finding slow interactions in a test environment
Diagnose slow interactions in a test environment
Identify and reduce input lag
Optimize event callbacks
Minimize presentation delay
For each of these optimizations, AO Lists Google has already produced articles to help you optimize your site. You can find this compilation on the Google Chrome developers blog.
And if you don’t have knowledge on the subject or don’t have expertise within your company, I advise you to invest in technical SEO, because your competition will. After all, the point here is to maintain or increase traffic to your site and deliver a good user experience.
