Optimize Google’s new interaction to next paint metric

The Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google has defined to measure how good a website’s user experience is. They first became a ranking in 2021.

While the metric definitions has been adjusted over timeis the introduction of the Interaction to Next Paint metric the biggest change since the introduction of the Core Web Vitals initiative.

What is interaction with next paint (INP)?

Interaction with Next Paint is a metric that evaluates how quickly your website responds to user interaction. It measures how much time passes between the user input, such as a button click, and the next time the page content refreshes (the “next paint”).

To rank better in Google, this interaction delay must be less than 200 milliseconds. This ensures that the website is responsive to users.

How are the Core Web Vitals changing?

Google announced that Interaction to Next Paint will become one of the three Core Web Vitals statistics in March 2024. At that point, a website that responds too slowly to user input may perform worse in search result rankings.

INP will replace the current one First input delay (FID) metric. Although FID also measures responsiveness, it is more limited as it only looks at the first user interaction. It...