Last month, Google announced that Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will replace First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vitals (CWV) metric starting in March 2024. In this blog, we’ll go over what those two metrics are and how this change will impact Google Search Console and website owners.
First Input Delay vs Interaction to Next Paint
First Input Delay is a Core Web Vital that measures the time in milliseconds from when a user first interacts with your site to when the browser is able to respond to that interaction. However, as Google noted in its article announcing the replacement of FID, there are known limitations to it. This led Google’s Chrome team to explore a metric that addresses these limitations more effectively: INP.
In 2022, Google announced INP as an additional CWV metric that uses data from the Event Timing API to evaluate the responsiveness of a webpage. By assessing latency user interactions, INP aims to provide better insights into the overall user experience on a website. After a year of testing, Google decided to replace FID with INP.
How This Will Impact Google Search Console and Website Owners
In terms of how this will impact Google Search Console, reports will stop showing FID metrics and use INP as the new metric for responsiveness starting in March 2024.
As for what this means for website owners, Google emphasizes continuing to improve Core Web Vitals as a whole and states that any improvements you have made for FID will be a good foundation to improve INP. That said, they also reiterated that great page experience involves more than just CWV and that these metrics alone do not guarantee good rankings.
Final Thoughts
While the replacement of FID with INP will change Google Search Console’s CWV reports, it’s important to keep in mind that these metrics are just one factor among many in enhancing page experience. Rather than solely focusing on INP, ensure you are consistently evaluating your site’s responsiveness and speed from a user-experience standpoint.
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