I often find myself eulogising about Google Search Console.
It really should be one of the ‘go to’ tools in your digital marketing tool box as it provides a wealth of extremely helpful data. Kudos to Google for providing this as a free service. Yes, you need to jump through a few hoops to set it up, but it really isn’t very difficult to do and is most definitely a worthwhile exercise.
Core Web Vitals
One of the most important reports in Search Console is Core Web Vitals, which is set of three user experience metrics that help identify potential problems with a website. The metrics are important as you should always be striving for the best possible user experience and, crucially, Core Web Vitals was integrated as a ranking signal in June 2021. In other words, a poor user experience will hurt your SEO.
The three metrics are currently:
1] Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
A measure of the time before the largest image / text block is rendered, once a page load is initiated. In plain English, this is a measure of how quickly the main content of a web page is loaded. Google considers only content ‘above the fold’, so content that will be displayed prior to any scrolling. You should be aiming for a sub 2.5 seconds LCP. The faster, the better.
2] Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
A measure of the visual stability of a page as it downloads. Nobody likes a page to jump around like a kangaroo on speed, so things like slow loading fonts, massive images that suddenly cause the page to jump or irritating pop ups will all impact the user experience and will hurt your CLS score. The scale is proprietary and you should be aiming for anything below 0.1. The lower, the better.
3] First Input Delay (FID)
This is another speed related metric, but measures the time required for any user interaction on a web page to be processed. In other words, how responsive is a web page to user actions. An analogy that I like is comparing it to the time that passes between ringing a doorbell and the door opening. Nobody likes to wait… It is sometimes called ‘Input Latency’ and is measured in milliseconds. You should be aiming for a FID of 100 milliseconds or less. The lower, the better.
You can see some example scores for our SEO Agency page below:
Thankfully, all scores are in the green and there is nothing to worry about for that page, but I would encourage you to examine your Core Web Vitals scores for key pages on your site as poor user experience will have a significant impact on your conversion rates, so it is not just an SEO concern.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
The beady eyed reader will have noticed that the screenshot above includes some ‘other notable metrics’, one of which is Interaction to Next Paint (INP). In March 2024, INP is set to replace FID.
You can think of INP as a better version of FID. In essence, they are similar as they both measure the perceived speed of interactions on a web page, but INP measures performances over the entire duration of a visit, whereas FID only measures the very first interaction, as the name would suggest.
More specifically, INP measures all mouse clicks, screen taps (where a touchscreen is used) and key presses (either onscreen or physical keyboards) and then highlights whichever has the worst delay. The metric considers three different components to calculate the score:
1] Input Delay
A measure of the delay between a user action (e.g. a button click) and its response. The smaller the delay, the better.
2] Processing Time
A measure of the time that is required to run code in response to a user action. This will vary according to the complexity of the code that is processed upon an interaction (e.g. a click on an accordion menu which reveals previously hidden (but loaded) content will almost always be far quicker to execute than any heavy duty client side application such as re-rendering complex tables). The faster the processing can be completed, the better.
3] Presentation Delay
A measure of the time that a browser spends calculating how to display new content following a user interaction. As with processing time, this will depend largely on the complexity of the response to a user interaction and you should always be aiming for the smallest possible delay.
Although there are tools to help diagnose these individual elements of the INP score, Google Search Console will present a combined score and you should be aiming for an INP of below 200 milliseconds. Anything above 500 milliseconds (half a second) is deemed to be ‘poor responsiveness’.
Do I need to worry about INP?
If you currently enjoy high FID scores, you may well feel as though you don’t need to stress about FID being replaced by INP.
It is perfectly possible that you are correct and have nothing to worry about. This is especially true if you have always worked hard at ensuring the speed and user experience of your website are excellent. It is, however, possible that you may be doing well with FID but that INP could prove to be more of a challenge.
Research suggests that most websites do pretty well when it comes to First Input Delay. The same cannot be said for Interaction to Next Paint, with just 64.7% of sites achieving a good mobile score.
You have plenty of time before INP officially replaces FID as a Core Web Vital, but I would encourage you to head over to https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and test a few pages on your site to make sure that you are performing well before March 2024 is upon us.
