Image source: Ashley West Edwards on Unsplash
Google has announced that its new responsiveness metric Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will replace the current First Input Delay (FID) in March next year.
INP was launched as an experimental metric in 2022, as there were known limitations with FID.
FID only reports the responsiveness of the first user interaction with the page rather than all interactions, and only measures the input delay of the first interaction, that is the time the browser had to wait before beginning to handle the interaction.
INP will assess a page’s overall responsiveness through all user interactions throughout the lifespan of the user’s visit to the page.
Here’s how Google defines INP:
“INP is a metric that assesses a page's overall responsiveness to user interactions by observing the latency of all click, tap, and keyboard interactions that occur throughout the lifespan of a user's visit to a page. The final INP value is the longest interaction observed, ignoring outliers.”
Here are Google's thresholds for good and poor INP.
Timeline
Google says INP has moved from experimental status to pending, meaning it will be introduced just not immediately.
INP will officially become a stable Core Web Vital metric in March 2024, at which point it will replace FID which will no longer be shown.
Google says only 65% of sites have good INP on mobile devices. To help site owners and developers evaluate their pages in readiness for the introduction of INP, Search Console will start including INP in the Core Web Vitals “later this year”.
While it recommends aiming for good Core Web Vitals scores to achieve good results with Search and user experience, Google notes that page experience involves more than Core Web Vitals alone. The scores fit into a holistic approach to page experience and in themselves don’t guarantee good rankings.
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