Google Update: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) Puts Responsiveness at the Heart of Core Web Vitals

Google update alert! In digital marketing, the calendar is set by algorithm changes from tech giants like Google and Meta. To kick off February, Google confirmed a significant change that will affect every website. The date is set: on March 12, 2024, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) becomes a Core Web Vital.

What is it, and how should you prepare? Référenceur breaks down the news for you.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP): The New Metric Focused on Interaction

Google, the most widely used search engine in the world, sets the rules of the web. It regularly adjusts how it ranks websites to deliver ever more relevant results to searchers.

Google evaluates sites against hundreds of ranking signals to rank them. Today, user experience and content reign supreme.

With the same goal of delivering the best possible result and a good experience for searchers, Google is replacing one of the flagship metrics in Core Web Vitals, the set of metrics that measures the quality of a site’s user experience.

So long, First Input Delay (FID), and hello, Interaction to Next Paint (INP). This new metric redefines how Google assesses the quality of a page’s user experience.

A Focus on Interactivity and Responsiveness

This update confirms Google’s growing attention to the interactivity and responsiveness of web pages.

The new metric measures how long it takes a page to visually respond after a user interacts with it, across the whole visit. First Input Delay, by contrast, only measured the delay between a user’s very first interaction with a page and the moment the browser started processing it.

Still a bit confusing? Here’s an example: Google will now measure the time between a click on a button and the page’s visible reaction, or between submitting a contact form and seeing the thank-you message.

A real step forward!

An Impact on Your Rankings

We’ve said it before, but in marketing it pays to repeat yourself: Core Web Vitals are part of your site’s user experience, and therefore part of how it ranks in Google’s search results. Page experience has carried weight since Google’s 2018 Speed Update made page speed a mobile ranking factor.

For most sites built to meet Google’s expectations and win organic traffic, user experience plays a major role. In fact, many people now talk about SXO (search experience optimization) as much as SEO.

To keep your site at the top of the class, here are the actions to take:

• Minimize JavaScript processing time by reducing the amount of code
• Optimize your fonts, favoring system fonts or self-hosted fonts to cut the number of requests needed to load the page
• Set up caching to speed up page loads for your regular, returning visitors
• Consider a Progressive Web App (PWA), which gives an app-like feel and helps speed up rendering and interactions on your site

In short, digital marketing keeps asking us to adapt: welcome your visitors well, respond quickly, and offer relevant, high-quality content on your site.

Have a question or a doubt about your site’s performance? Référenceur is a French-speaking digital marketing agency from Belgium and Luxembourg that works with U.S. businesses remotely, and our web design team builds sites with responsiveness in mind. Get a free assessment of your site.

Where Things Stand in 2026

INP officially replaced FID as a Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024, as announced, and FID was then phased out of Google’s reporting tools. Today, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less is considered “good,” alongside Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Our website speed optimization checklist covers all three.