Understanding INP vs FID.

Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that show how fast, interactive, and stable a webpage is. They're crucial for SEO, as improving them can boost your site's search rankings and ensure a great user experience.

As of March 2024, Google's transitioning from measuring First Input Delay (FID) to a new metric, Interaction Next Paint (INP). 

FID measures the time it takes for a user to first interact with a webpage, while INP includes additional data about input responsiveness throughout the entire page load process.

This change aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of user experience on websites, helping developers and marketers optimise their sites for better performance and user satisfaction.

Yes, INP could affect your website rankings. Lower INP scores indicate a more responsive website, which search engines favour. Additionally, INP offers a broader view of user interaction than the previous FID metric.

1. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how quickly a webpage responds to user actions without relying on JavaScript or CSS code. This makes it more universal than FID (First Input Delay) and applicable to both mobile and desktop sites.
2. INP works consistently across different devices and browsers. This means that even if your website performs well on one browser but not on another, you can still assess its responsiveness accurately using INP. It focuses solely on how fast your browser reacts to user inputs, unaffected by factors like network delays or rendering issues.
3. INP can assess the responsiveness of any webpage, including your homepage and other interactive pages on your site. This makes it valuable for optimising user experience across various sections of your website.

1. INP isn't currently supported by third-party services. If you want to use it, you'll need to implement it yourself or with your SEO agency.
2. INP relies on the Google Chrome browser. So, to gather data for your website, you'll need to use Google Chrome as your main browser if you aren't already.
3. While INP measures how quickly a page responds to user inputs without external factors like network delays or rendering issues, there could still be internal factors causing delays that INP doesn't capture. For instance, if a webpage has JavaScript loading resources from other domains (like ads or widgets), it could slow down the page's responsiveness even if it's quick to respond to user inputs otherwise.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is measured in milliseconds, representing the time it takes for a webpage to react to the first user input, such as clicking a link or button.

Google suggests that:

• An INP of 200 milliseconds or less indicates good responsiveness.
• An INP between 200 and 500 milliseconds suggests room for improvement in responsiveness.
• An INP above 500 milliseconds indicates poor responsiveness.

While we are aligned with the guides, we believe it's best to look at it in terms of your competitive landscape and positioning yourselves above your top -anking competitors. 

Yes, INP is a Core Web Vitals metric and will replace FID for measuring responsiveness from 12th March 2024. This is the first major change in Core Web Vitals as a metric since its introduction. 

The following interactions are counted for INP:

• Mouse clicks
• Taps (on a touch screen)
• Key presses

The following interactions do not count:

• Hovering
• Scrolling

You can use a number of tools to measure Interaction to Next Paint, such as:

• The DebugBear website speed test
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• The INP Debugger
• Google Search Console
• Our complimentary CrUX report 
• In-depth Page Speed Audit