INP (Interaction to Next Paint)

INP is the new core web vital metric that uses data from Event Timing API to assess the responsiveness of a webpage.

It observes the latency of all taps, clicks, and, keyboard interactions with a webpage and assigns an INP score which almost all the interactions are below.

As per Google, a page’s responsiveness directly impacts user experience. Therefore, it becomes an important metric to improve the user experience of a website. 

A low INP means that a page responds quickly. On the other hand, a high INP means that the webpage takes too long to respond to an interaction.

An INP score below 200 milliseconds denotes good responsiveness. If 75% or more of your web pages have an INP score of up to 200 milliseconds, it means that your website is highly responsive.

Let us quickly understand how you can determine page responsiveness using the INP score:

• An INP score less than or equal to 200 milliseconds denotes good responsiveness.
• An INP score between 200 and 500 milliseconds denotes that your website needs improvement.
• An INP score above 500 milliseconds denotes poor responsiveness.

In order to deliver the best user experience, you need to ensure that most of your web pages lie under the ‘good responsiveness’ threshold.

Good responsiveness means that your website responds quickly to any interaction. When an interaction takes place, the browser adds visual feedback in the next frame to show whether the interaction was successful or not. 

Some interactions are naturally longer, but for complex interactions, it becomes quite essential to inform users that some response is coming.

When this visual feedback is delayed, users tend to think that the page is not responsive, which further affects their experience negatively.

The ultimate goal of INP is to minimize the time between when an interaction initiates and when the next frame is painted. 

Talking about FID (First Input Delay), it is the older metric that has been replaced by INP. It was also related to page responsiveness but could not capture different aspects of interactivity.

This is why a new core web vital metric was required. FID will no longer be there in the Google Search Console Report.

You will instead see INP scores in this report, which will help you understand how well your web pages respond.