INP: Google’s Newest Core Web Vital

A website with a good INP score is like a car with power steering. Have you ever driven a car without power steering? It’s an incredibly frustrating and physically-demanding experience. The amount of effort needed and the distance that the steering wheel needs to move for basic maneuvers is untenable. How did our forefathers (or fathers, for that matter) do it?

Visit a website suffering from poor INP scores and be magically transported to the driver’s seat of a 1996 Toyota Tercel. Every movement feels clunky and cumbersome. Tap the navigation menu, microwave some popcorn, start snacking, and then see the menu items expand. That’s why it isn’t a mystery that Google has made INP a top priority for websites, and have factored INP into their Core Web Vitals.

What is INP Exactly?

INP is the amount of time between a user interaction and the first visual change on the screen. A website with a low INP means the web page responds quickly to the majority of visitor interactions.

INP replaced First Input Delay (FID) in the Core Web Vitals formula. FID was a measure of how long it took for the website to be able to receive the first input. INP is a measure of how long the interactions actually take to complete.

This is significant because measuring INP is more complicated than the other two Web Vitals. It isn’t possible to capture INP with PageSpeed Insights, for instance. To capture an accurate INP score, use a RUM (real user monitoring) tool like DebugBear instead of PSI or GTMetrix.

Why Replace INP with FID?

FID was notoriously easy to pass, with over 90% of all websites achieving the Good threshold. However, Google could see FID’s limitations in capturing real user interactions, so they created INP. Over 90% of website visitors are spending their time on the page performing a task, not just loading the web page over and over again. FID missed the mark on measuring true user interactions because it only measured the amount of time before a web page was ready to receive input.

Because INP measures the actual user activities, Interaction to Next Paint is a much better measure of interactivity. INP creates a more clear picture of how quick and easy it is to take actions on a website, which is why it replaced FID on March 12th.

INP Benchmarks

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