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INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is Google’s newest Core Web Vital metric, measuring how quickly your site responds to user interaction.
Ads can impact INP, but many sites running ads have excellent INP scores (including approximately 50% of sites working with Raptive), proving that you can run ads and have an optimized site. Use this guide to review your site’s performance and understand how you can improve this metric.
What is a good INP score?
“At least 75% of INP experiences should respond to user input in under 200 milliseconds to be considered good.” (web.dev)
A lower INP score is better, meaning the site responds to user input faster. A higher INP score is worse, meaning it takes the site longer to respond.
What causes a higher (worse) INP score?
High INP scores are caused by having many long-running tasks on a page that make the page respond slower to user interactions.
A “task” is code that runs in the browser—it could be something needed to load the page, display content, or perform a specific job like tracking visits, running an ad auction, or adding an email sign-up form.
Tasks share the same browser resources, so the goal is to have as few and as short tasks as possible to make the page very responsive to any new user interaction that might happen during a pageview.
INP scores are reported as the 75th percentile of all INP events monitored for the page as an estimate of the page’s responsiveness for most users.
We did a comprehensive deep-dive into INP to identify common patterns of what causes high INP scores.
Here’s what we learned:
- Mobile is challenging for INP. We usually see higher INP scores on mobile devices compared to desktop since mobile devices have fewer resources available, causing tasks to run slower. It’s important to note that Core Web Vitals can’t currently be measured on iOS devices, so traffic from those devices is not included in the score.
- Feature-heavy pages have worse INP. The more things you have running on the page, the more likely you are to have high INP scores. Any JavaScript you add to a page will use additional page resources. As this adds up, there are fewer resources available to quickly respond to inputs from your users as they happen.
- You can have ads + good INP. While ads can impact INP, we see many sites run ads and have passing INP scores. We’re continuing to find solutions that can reduce our contribution to INP and have been releasing improvements as they come (we released a major improvement on March 12 and saw 50% more sites reach good INP scores!), but for some sites, this alone won’t be enough to reach passing levels of INP.
- Certain types of ads may be more resource-intensive than others. Ads that expand or have other fancy animations and user interactions can be associated with longer-running tasks that could have a slight impact on page performance. From our testing, we found that turning these ad types off resulted in a median 6-point improvement to INP, but a 1.6% decline in revenue.
What's my INP, and why?
To see your site's specific INP and understand what's contributing to this metric:
- Start with the Page Speed Insights report. Input a URL to see the page’s Core Web Vitals performance from the past 28 days of real field data. This report gives detailed, actionable information on areas of your site that could be affecting page performance. Here are more details from Google on how to interpret this report.
- Use Chrome DevTools (specifically the Performance tab) to dive even deeper into what could be contributing to high INP scores. Record a page on your site loading to see which tasks are consuming the most resources and time—here’s how.
- Use the CrUX dashboard or the Core Web Vitals tab in your Google Search Console account to see your INP performance over time. The CrUX dashboard has a summary of your site’s overall performance, whereas Google Search Console shows how many URLs on your site have a passing INP score over time.
What if I don't have a good INP score?
INP became an official Core Web Vital metric on March 12, 2024. However, given that this is just one of three Core Web Vitals, among a vast number of other potential Google Search ranking factors, it is currently unclear how much INP will contribute to changes in SEO performance for a page.
Here are some strategies you can use today to improve your INP scores:
- Conduct an audit for your site using the resources above to diagnose what could be contributing most to high INP scores. Remember: look for things running on the site that have long tasks and use a lot of resources.
- Reduce the amount of things running on your page. Take a look at the plugins you have enabled but may no longer need and remove the ones you can live without. Also see how many places you invite interaction on your site (email popup forms, interactive elements, etc.) and see if you can streamline those to only the essentials.
- Reach out to Raptive support to discuss options for your ad layout. Restricting the types of ads that can load on your site will impact your revenue, but we’re happy to share details to help you balance SEO, UX, and RPMs.
What else is Raptive doing?
We’re continuing to experiment with ways to reduce ads’ contribution to INP while keeping your revenue high. We’re constantly testing and releasing updates that are helping more and more sites see good INP scores.
Here’s what we’re testing next:
- We’re working on more opportunities to break up long-running ad code tasks. The faster ads are, the faster the page responds to other events happening (such as user interactions), leading to better INP scores.
- We're improving our measurement to get the most accurate and detailed information. We’re implementing the recently released Long Animation Frames API (LoAF) so we can better understand a site's longest-running tasks. We're also analyzing CrUX data daily to ensure we’re using the exact same data Google will use to assess your site’s Core Web Vitals performance.
- We’re conducting an audit for all ad types and bidders. By collecting more data on the performance and revenue tradeoffs of each partner and ad type we work with, we’ll be able to provide better guidance about the best options to improve INP and keep ad revenue high.