At Google’s I/O annual conference, it was announced that from March 2024, Google will be replacing First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
What is Interaction to Next Paint?
Interaction to Next Paint is a new metric that utilises the Event Timing API that assesses a website’s responsiveness for visitors. As Google has been focusing on user experience, if any interaction causes unresponsiveness in a page, it will result in a bad user experience. Therefore, Google will be introducing this as a Core Web Vitals metric which is a ranking factor for Google. INP looks at all interactions’ latency on a website and reports a singular value with which most of the interactions are below.
One of Google’s Developer Relations Engineers, Martin Splitt, did reiterate when announcing the update that having a website with amazing Core Web Vitals doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be ranking highly for your target keywords. There are many other factors that Google’s ranking systems consider when ranking your website in search results, including making sure that the content on your website is useful for searchers.
The new metric will also be shown by the end of the year within the Core Web Vitals report that is available in Google Search Console and the field data that is available in Page Speed Insights – this does depend on if you have enough visitors to your website to show this data, as the metrics are collected from real visitors to your website. This will allow you to see how your website is performing before this metric becomes part of Core Web Vitals.
If you want to increase your leads and sales online, then reach our friendly team at Engage Web to discuss how we can help market your business online.
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