First Input Delay
Also called: FID
First Input Delay (FID) was a Core Web Vitals metric that measured the time from a user's first interaction with a page (a tap, click, or key press) to when the browser could begin processing that event. Google retired it on March 12, 2024 and replaced it with Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
FID only captured input delay: the wait before the browser could start running an event handler, and only for the first interaction of a visit. It never counted how long the handler took to run or how long the result took to paint. A page could post a perfect FID and still feel slow, because most of the lag lived in the parts FID ignored. Its 75th-percentile thresholds were Good at 100 ms or less, Needs improvement between 100 and 300 ms, and Poor above 300 ms.
Why INP took over
Interaction to Next Paint fixes the blind spots. It looks at every interaction during a visit, not just the first, and adds up input delay plus processing time plus presentation delay, so it reflects the full round trip a user actually feels. INP’s field thresholds are Good at 200 ms or less and Poor above 500 ms, again at the 75th percentile.
The handover was staged. FID dropped out of Google Search Console the day INP became a Core Web Vital, March 12, 2024. PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome UX Report kept FID through a six-month deprecation window that closed in September 2024. Today FID is gone from Google’s tooling. If a dashboard still reports it, that report is reading a metric Google no longer collects.
How it affects your traffic
FID is now dead weight in an audit. The responsiveness signal that feeds Google's page experience assessment is INP, so any technical work aimed at FID is optimizing a number nobody measures anymore. Worse, a green FID score can hide a poor INP, which means real users hitting slow tap-to-response times while the old metric says everything is fine. Our Technical SEO work rebases these checks on INP field data (long tasks, heavy event handlers, main-thread blocking) so the responsiveness you fix is the one Google and your visitors actually feel.
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