Interaction to Next Paint
Also called: INP
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a Core Web Vital that measures how quickly a page responds to user interactions, reporting the latency (in milliseconds) of roughly its slowest click, tap, or keyboard interaction across a visit. Google rates 200 ms or below as good and above 500 ms as poor.
What INP actually measures
INP watches every click, tap, and keyboard interaction for the whole time someone is on a page, then reports close to the slowest one (extreme outliers are trimmed). It ignores scrolling, hovering, and zooming. Each interaction breaks into three phases: input delay (waiting for the main thread to free up), processing duration (running your event handlers), and presentation delay (painting the next frame). A slow number in any single phase drags the whole score down.
Google’s thresholds are 200 ms or below (good), above 200 ms up to 500 ms (needs improvement), and above 500 ms (poor). The verdict is taken at the 75th percentile of real page loads, so it reflects your slower visits, not an average.
INP became an official Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024, replacing First Input Delay (FID). FID only timed the delay before the first interaction was handled, so a page could pass FID while feeling sluggish on every later click. INP closes that gap by scoring the full session.
Most INP debt lives in JavaScript. Long tasks block the main thread, so the standard fixes are: break work into smaller tasks, yield to the main thread between them, ship less JavaScript, shrink the DOM, and use CSS content-visibility to skip rendering off-screen content. Third-party scripts (chat widgets, tag managers) are common culprits.
How it affects your traffic
INP is one of the three Core Web Vitals Google folds into its page experience signals, so a page stuck in the "poor" band above 500 ms can lose ground on competitive queries and leak conversions when menus, filters, and forms feel laggy. Because most INP debt hides in JavaScript and third-party scripts, diagnosing it needs field data from the Chrome UX Report plus lab profiling, not guesswork. Our Technical SEO work isolates the interactions that fail, trims the scripts causing them, and gets your 75th-percentile INP back under Google's 200 ms good threshold.
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