Unlocking INP: Boost Your Website's Responsiveness & Traffic

I recently saw a statistic that 90.63% of pages get no search traffic from Google. None. And this is huge, considering that about 94% of organic searches come from Google.

One of the reasons so many pages are missed is that Google use certain metrics to test the quality of your website, and these metrics impact your ratings. And if your site doesn't score well, it's is not likely to show up in a good position within the search results.

Now, are you wondering how you can improve your website so it joins the 9% of web pages that do get viewed? Well, you should.

What's the point in having a website and creating new content if no one ever sees it? Okay, you should be aware that a key consideration to how well your website shows up in Google search results is user experience. And part of that user experience is how well your website functions relative to other sites. So what are the ways to improve your page and start generating traffic? Google answered this by introducing three core web vitals related to the first impression your website makes. And these are called

1.????? LCP

2.????? FID

3.????? CLS

LCP(Largest Contentful Paint):

LCP analyses the time it takes for the largest image or text block to appear on your screen. By getting that bulk image to load quicker, your website will seem to appear much faster. Have you ever been frustrated waiting for something to appear on the screen after you arrive at a website? This is what you want to avoid happening.

FID (First Input Delay):

However, even if your website is fast, there are other factors that still might affect its overall performance, like responsiveness or how fast your page interacts with users. This is another core web vital called F FID, or first input delay. Fid measures how responsive a web page is. It considers all interactions that happen on your website, like clicking buttons or tapping keys. When you go to a website and click the menu, what would you do if nothing happens? I would hit the back button and check other websites, but maybe that's just me. This is exactly what you want to prevent, which is why we need to focus on FID.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift):

And then the last core web vital is called CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift. When you visit a website, you see a button or a link that you're interested in, and then just when you're about to click it, button moves and you end up clicking something else. That is annoying. Cls measures how much your website content moves around the screen as your page is loading.

These were introduced in 2020. But more recently, Google announced they're making some improvements to these web vitals to better judge how good a web page is.

One of the core vitals, FID, has some problems and some limitations. So the team at Google looked for a better way to measure responsiveness, and they came up with an experimental metric called “Interaction to Next Paint”, or INP. After a year of testing and gathering feedback in 2022, the team decided that INP is more effective in measuring responsiveness. And starting in March of 2024, INP will replace FID.

let's get to know more about this new Core Web vital.

What is IMP?

Interaction to Next Paint is a way to check how fast a web page responds to what you do on it. When you interact with a page, like clicking a button or typing something, IMP measures how quickly the page shows the results of your actions. This is helpful because it doesn't need fancy codes like JavaScript or CSS or anything else to work. ?Instead, it just looks at how fast the browser can show stuff on the screen after you do something on the page. It basically tells us how smoothly the website runs and how fast you can move around on it.

So if a website has a good IMP score, it means it responds well and is easy to use. For example, if you add an item to your online shopping cart, a good page will immediately show you the item has been added. The same goes for other interactions like opening a mobile navigation menu or logging in from a form. What's a good IMP score? Since IMP measures how quickly a page responds to your actions, the score is simply a measure of time.

·???????? Google says if your IMP is 200 milliseconds or less, it's considered good because your page responds quickly.

·???????? If it's between 200 and 500 milliseconds, it needs improvement because the response is a little bit slow.

·???????? But if the IMP is above 500 milliseconds, it means the page has poor responsiveness. It takes too long to respond to your actions.

Apparently, we're so impatient that waiting one-half second is horrible. Keep in mind that IMP is new, though. If your web page was considered good for other metrics before IMP was introduced, it doesn't necessarily mean it will be good for IMP, too.

So it's a good idea to check your web page performance using Page Speed Insights to see how it does for IMP.

To do this, simply go to the Page Speed Insights website, enter the URL of the web page you want to test in the provided field, and then click Analyze. After analyzing the page, it will generate a report. Look for your IMP score in the report, and you will see a list of top issues that might be affecting the IMP score.

How to improve your INP Score:

To improve your INP numbers, you can try some typical ways to speed up interactions like

·???????? reducing the number of third -party elements,

·???????? delaying the loading of unnecessary code

·???????? giving priority to elements that users are likely to interact with first, and of course

Difference between INP and FID:

Now you might be wondering, what's the difference between INP and FID? Or maybe you're not wondering at all, but I'm going to tell you anyway. FID measures how responsible web page is, but it has some limitations.

Its name gives away two of these limitations, first input and delay. It only focuses on the very first time you interact with the page, which may not represent all interactions you have with the page over time.

And it only measures the delay in responding to that first interaction, not the entire process from when you interact with the page until the browser shows the result. INP, on the other hand, takes into account all interactions you have with the page, not just the first one.

And it reports the slowest response time throughout the whole time you use the page. It also measures the entire duration from when you interact with the page to when the browser shows the result, including all of the steps in between.

Compared to FID, INP is a more comprehensive measure of how quickly you perceive the page to respond. In simpler terms, INP gives a better overall picture of how responsive the page is from all your interactions, not just the first one.

However, INP has some limitations too, since it only pays attention to certain types of actions, and it doesn't consider hovering or regular scrolling of a web page. However, if you scroll using the keyboard, like pressing the space bar or the up and down arrows, it counts as an interaction that INP does consider.

For INP, it only looks at three specific types of actions,

·???????? clicking with the mouse,

·???????? tapping on a touch screen device, and

·???????? Pressing a key on either a physical keyboard or an on -screen keyboard.

And that's it. That's your new Core Web Vital. And you don't have to wait until 2024 for INP to become an important measure. INP gives a more precise idea of how responsive your website is, so the numbers show where there's room for improvement.

Conclusion :

Start working on improving your INP now to make your website even better. Scoring a perfect 100% on your website is not an easy task. You will definitely need more time and effort. But if you want to drive more clients and bring more traffic to your site, then it's definitely worth the time.

By improving your site, you'll provide a better user experience, helping you to convert traffic into sales.