As the digital landscape evolves, providing a seamless user experience on your website is essential for success. Google's Core Web Vitals have become critical for webmasters and SEO professionals who want to optimize their sites for better search rankings. In 2025, Google is rolling out a new metric that will change how website performance is measured—Interaction to Next Paint (INP). This metric will replace the First Input Delay (FID) as part of Google’s Core Web Vitals.

For businesses looking to stay competitive, partnering with SEO services like Rankonix ensures your website stays up-to-date with Google’s latest standards. Rankonix offers expert SEO services to help you achieve optimal scores on Core Web Vitals, ensuring that your website not only meets Google’s expectations but also provides an outstanding user experience.

In this article, we’ll explain what the INP metric is, why it's important, how it differs from FID, and how you can optimize your site to perform well with the new INP measurement.

What Are Core Web Vitals and Why They Matter?

Core Web Vitals are a set of user-centered metrics introduced by Google to measure a website’s user experience in terms of speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. These metrics focus on real-world experiences, aiming to ensure that users have fast, smooth, and uninterrupted browsing experiences.

For website owners, meeting Core Web Vitals standards has become a necessity. Google has confirmed that websites with good Core Web Vitals scores rank better in search results. This has made optimizing for these metrics crucial for maintaining visibility on Google.

In 2025, Google is updating these metrics by adding the INP (Interaction to Next Paint), which will be a key part of the new standard for measuring website performance.

What is INP (Interaction to Next Paint)?

INP, or Interaction to Next Paint, is a new metric that Google will use to measure how quickly a webpage responds to user interactions. It tracks the time between a user’s action (such as clicking a button or tapping a link) and the visual update or change that happens on the page (the “paint”).

INP gives a more accurate picture of how responsive a website is to users' actions, as it captures all interactions on a page, not just the first one. This is important because websites often have multiple interactions, and users expect a quick visual response every time they interact with a site.

Why is INP Being Introduced?

Google has introduced INP to provide a more comprehensive measure of website responsiveness. Previously, the First Input Delay (FID) metric only measured the delay of the first interaction a user had with a page. This limited the insight into overall user experience, especially for websites with complex content or features that require multiple interactions.

INP improves upon FID by measuring the longest delay across all interactions on a page. It considers any interaction, whether it’s a click, tap, or keypress, and tracks the delay before the browser can respond with a visual change. This makes INP a more complete measure of how users experience the performance of a website.

The Changes Coming in 2025: What You Need to Know

Google’s INP metric will officially become part of Core Web Vitals starting in March 2025. This means that FID will be phased out, and INP will take its place as the primary metric for measuring website responsiveness.

Once INP is live, webmasters will no longer see FID scores in tools like Google Search Console. Instead, the focus will shift to INP, and this will directly affect your website’s performance in search rankings. Websites with poor INP scores could see a drop in search rankings, while websites with good INP scores will benefit from improved visibility.

How to Measure Your INP Score

It’s important to regularly check your website’s INP score to ensure it meets Google’s standards. Here’s how you can do that:

1. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool provides a detailed performance report of your website, including your INP score. Simply enter your website URL, and the tool will analyze your site’s performance, including the new INP metric, along with other Core Web Vitals scores like LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) and FID.

2. SEOptimer

SEOptimer is another tool that offers website audits and checks your INP score. By running an SEO audit, you can easily find your INP score in the “Usability” section of the report. This can be a helpful alternative for additional insights into your site’s performance.

What Is a Good INP Score?

For an excellent user experience, Google recommends an INP score of 200 milliseconds or less. Websites that have an INP score within this range are considered responsive, which is critical for keeping visitors engaged.

However, if your website’s INP score is above 500 milliseconds, it is considered poor. A slow response time can lead to frustration for users, which may result in higher bounce rates and lower rankings in search results.

Tips to Improve Your INP Score

Improving your INP score involves enhancing your website’s responsiveness and reducing delays in user interactions. Here are some practical tips to help you improve your INP score:

1. Minimize Main Thread Workload

The main thread of a browser handles tasks like rendering the page, processing JavaScript, and responding to user interactions. If the main thread is overloaded, it can delay the browser’s response. Reduce unnecessary tasks and break down large scripts to ensure smoother performance.

2. Optimize Key Interactions

Some user interactions are more important than others, such as clicking buttons or submitting forms. Focus on optimizing these key interactions to ensure fast responses, even if other less critical actions can take a little longer.

3. Use Background Tasks

For tasks that are not essential to the immediate user experience, such as loading images or processing data, offload them to background threads. This frees up the main thread and ensures faster response times for user interactions.

4. Compress Resources and Minimize Code

Large files can slow down your website. By compressing images and minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, you can reduce their size and improve load times. This will help make your website faster and more responsive.

5. Prioritize Critical Content

Ensure that the most important parts of your website, such as text and images, load first. This creates the feeling of a fast website, even if some of the less important content takes longer to load.

Rankonix: Best SEO Services for Core Web Vitals Optimization

Rankonix is a leading SEO service provider that specializes in optimizing websites for the latest Core Web Vitals metrics, including INP. By working with Rankonix, you can ensure that your website is fully optimized to meet Google’s performance standards, improving both your user experience and your search rankings.

Conclusion: Getting Ready for INP in 2025

The new INP metric is set to become a key part of Google’s Core Web Vitals in 2025, replacing the First Input Delay (FID) metric. As a website owner or SEO professional, it’s important to understand how INP works and how to optimize your website for the best user experience.

By checking your INP score regularly, optimizing key interactions, and reducing delays, you can ensure that your website remains responsive and performs well in search results. With the right strategies and ongoing optimization, your website can deliver an outstanding user experience and maintain strong rankings in Google’s search results.