Replacement: INP enters, FID leaves
Posted: Sun Jan 05, 2025 7:13 am
Interaction to Next Paint?
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 Google’s words, “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
Source: https://web.dev/optimize-inp
According to Google, “To ensure you’re hitting this target for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices.”
Respecting this millisecond mark, Google considers that you are delivering a good user experience. Therefore, your page also earns points in search rankings, see?
And at this point you must have already understood what Core Web Vitals are, right? This is a Google report that SEO professionals and web developers can track through Google Search Console.
It is a great tool for you to deliver a good user experience via your website or blog. Which in turn favors good ranking in Google searches.
There are more, but three key metrics are vital:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) which measures loading performance by analyzing page load.
First Input Delay (FID) which measures interactivity through the first input delay.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) which measures the visual stability of the page across the highest burst of layout shift occurrences.
The values that Google considers optimal for each of these metrics are illustrated in the image below.
Just before moving on to the next section, I thought it would be interesting to explain here the “paint” of all these metrics.
Fun fact! “Paint” does not refer to literal painting, but to the process of rendering visual elements on the page. A more accurate translation of “paint” in the context of LCP or INP would be “rendering” or “drawing” the visual elements on the page.
To explain the reason for the change, there’s no netherlands phone numbers 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 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.
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 Google’s words, “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
Source: https://web.dev/optimize-inp
According to Google, “To ensure you’re hitting this target for most of your users, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, segmented across mobile and desktop devices.”
Respecting this millisecond mark, Google considers that you are delivering a good user experience. Therefore, your page also earns points in search rankings, see?
And at this point you must have already understood what Core Web Vitals are, right? This is a Google report that SEO professionals and web developers can track through Google Search Console.
It is a great tool for you to deliver a good user experience via your website or blog. Which in turn favors good ranking in Google searches.
There are more, but three key metrics are vital:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) which measures loading performance by analyzing page load.
First Input Delay (FID) which measures interactivity through the first input delay.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) which measures the visual stability of the page across the highest burst of layout shift occurrences.
The values that Google considers optimal for each of these metrics are illustrated in the image below.
Just before moving on to the next section, I thought it would be interesting to explain here the “paint” of all these metrics.
Fun fact! “Paint” does not refer to literal painting, but to the process of rendering visual elements on the page. A more accurate translation of “paint” in the context of LCP or INP would be “rendering” or “drawing” the visual elements on the page.
To explain the reason for the change, there’s no netherlands phone numbers 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 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.