Recently, many users have started receiving messages from Google Search Console saying that they need to fix their INP metrics in Core Web Vitals. At this point (July 2023), Google PageSpeed Insights has not made any changes and does not measure this metric in any way. Google introduced the INP (Interaction to Next Paint) metric back last year at the Google I/O conference. All we know so far is that INP is designed to measure the overall response rate to user actions on a page.
Core Web Vitals has a metric of interactivity FID (First Input Delay), but this indicator has several limitations, for example, it covers only the first interaction of the user with the site. So Google came to create a new metric INP, which takes into account the life cycle of the page completely and will be able to become an alternative to FID. During a year the new metric was tested by a community of specialists, after which Google decided to promote INP as a new indicator of Core Web Vitals, instead of the FID metric. The full replacement is scheduled to take place in March 2024.
As reported on Google’s blog, Search Console will include the INP metric in the Core Web Vitals report later this year and the FID metric will disappear from the report in 2024. Google notes that if site owners followed Google’s recommendations and improved the FID metric, those changes will have a positive impact on the INP metric as well.
You can learn more about INP on the Chrome team blog. We also recommend reading this article. My opinion is that this will be the end of the era of Nitropack and similar plugins that cheat Google.
Update 2025
Almost a year has passed since Google introduced the new Core Web Vitals metric, INP (Interaction to Next Paint), it’s become clear that this metric can be effectively improved on 90% of websites with the right optimization strategies. INP measures responsiveness, particularly how quickly a site reacts to user interactions like clicks or taps. For most sites, the issues contributing to poor INP scores are rooted in inefficient scripts, unoptimized JavaScript, or heavy third-party resources. With targeted optimizations such as reducing long tasks, delaying (deferring) unnecessary scripts, and leveraging modern web performance techniques achieving a good INP score is not only feasible but often straightforward. This further emphasizes the importance of regular performance audits and fine-tuning for maintaining a high-performing, user-friendly website.
Leave a Reply