Wondering what might be the reason for the high bounce rate for your website? It might be possible that your customers are having poor user experience on your website which is driving them away. In that case, you must check your website’s responsiveness. How to do that? Well, Google is our savior!

Google introduced Core Web Vitals back in 2020, with the aim to provide quality signals to each web page of any website. Recently, Google announced the introduction of a new metric to measure website responsiveness named Interaction to Next Paint (INP) by March 2024. This is going to replace the existing metric First Input Delay (FID).

Before you take advantage of the new metric INP, let us help you to understand what exactly it is and how it is going to help you by replacing the existing metric FID.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web vitals are basically a set of standard metrics provided by Google that helps anyone trying to understand how well the users’ experience is toward a particular page. This tool was primarily intended for developers but has assisted every website owner to understand whether the web page is functional in generating revenue or is driving leads away.

These metrics measure web page aspects.  So, once you are aware of your website responsiveness with the help of Core Web Vitals, you can always optimize it to make it perform better and enhance user experience.

About FID (First Input Delay)

FID is one of the key metrics of Core Web Vitals. It measures the amount of time taken by a web page to respond when user interaction is made. The interaction can be through a click, a scroll, or a tap through the content. An FID score is considered good if it is below 100 milliseconds and bad if it is above 300 milliseconds. This metric shows you how responsive your web page is. If your web page is responsive, it means you are providing a good user experience to your customers.

This First Input Delay is going to be replaced by Interaction to Next Paint, or simply INP, by March 2024. This is an important change for Core Web Vitals as it is predicted to introduce a more comprehensive solution to measure the performance of a website. Let us understand why Google has taken this step.

Introduction to INP (Interaction to Next Paint)

So, the introduction of INP means that there will be a lot of changes in how website performance is viewed and assessed. Unlike FID, INP will not solely concentrate on the delay for the first user interaction and will consider other aspects of web performance. It will look after the overall interactivity of your website, understanding the user interaction apart from the initial delay.

INP enhances web performance in a number of ways providing a more holistic evaluation of website responsiveness. It considers all inputs from every user that has visited the web page. This will allow you to optimize the entire interactive experience of each web page of your website in place of only concentrating on the first input delay. INP will also allow you to assess your website responsiveness based on different interactions. This may include clicks, scrolls, taps, or other actions taken by the users.

Thus, the INP metric will provide you with a more accurate representation of how your users are perceiving and engaging with the elements of your website. This will help you to make informed optimizations which in turn will improve your user experience and satisfaction. In a nutshell, INP will help you to improve the search engine rankings of your website better than FID.

Conclusion

So, overall, this could be good news for you, if you are trying to improve the outcome of your website. While INP provides you with better metrics than FID, it will definitely help you to optimize your website better for finer website responsiveness and hence draw in more suitable search engine rankings.

As a leading digital agency in Philly, we are helping our clients in assessing and improve their core web vitals so that they can take benefit of this opportunity to rank higher on organic Google search results.

If you would like us to take a look at your core web vitals and help you improve the page experience for your users, give us a holler at hello@dignitas.digital.

Till then, Happy Optimizing!