You are losing up to 10x of your business because your website is not optimized for multiple devices. It must be difficult that nowadays many people access the internet using their phones and tablets.
You’re losing visitors if your website fails to optimize for these devices! This is where mobile-friendly or responsive websites are useful. A responsive website may change its size and design to match any device, phone, tablet, or computer to provide the user with the best shopping or browsing experience.
Now the question comes, how can you identify if your website is responsive for multiple devices or not? This is where Interaction to Next Paint comes in. In this post today we will understand the importance of INP (interaction to next paint) in detail. So, let’s get started.
How Can you Know that your Website is Responsive for Viewers?
To identify whether your website is responsive or not, we use the essential information called Interaction to Next Paint (INP). This essentially measures how quickly a user interacts with your website through clicks, taps, and scrolls.
Your visitors will have a better user experience every time your website performs fast and smooth. Consider it as clicking the “order button” on your website. If your INP is strong, it will display the confirmation right away, giving you a sense of satisfaction.
You need to make sure your website loads quickly and keep the users of your website interested and engaged by knowing and optimizing INP. This can increase your sales, get more new customers and also satisfy users.
What is Interaction to Next Paint (INP)?
In simple language INP, Interaction to next paint is the optimized UI and UX of the website. To make it more simple to understand, you just need to understand that your business or service website should be smooth enough to execute all the functionalities and features. Also, the load time of your website should be shorter which attracts the users to stay back and explore for a longer time.
A quick INP shows that the website responds instantly, such as by showing a confirmation message. However, a slow INP can cause you to wait continuously, questioning whether you actually performed any action or not!
The best part is that INP takes into account every action you take on a website—not just the initial click. As a result, it keeps track of how quickly you tap, scroll, and even press the keyboard on the website.
This is not the same as First Contentful Paint (FCP), a different measurement that measures how quickly the page’s first content loads. INP is all about how quickly the website responds after the first load, making sure it is responsive and feels smooth to you.
Why is INP Important?
Remember the last time you used a website and it felt confusing and slow. It’s possible that after pressing a button, nothing happened for a little while. annoying, isn’t? A poor INP can cause your website to suffer from this. As a result this eventually makes a website challenging to use because it takes too long to respond to your actions.
However, INP is about more than just satisfying users. When ranking a website in search results, Google, the most popular search engine, takes into thought many factors including INP. For this reason, a slow website might not rank as highly in search results, which could make it harder for people to find you and also impact SEO in the long run.
How is INP Measured?
You can measure the INP of your website by inviting your friends to check out your website. Once done, you can take individual feedback in reference to time and understand how long it takes for a button to be clicked on a website.
This “timing” comes from actual Google Chrome users. INP provides real-world insights into how fast your website feels for everyone. The secret is that INP measures the slowest click ever. After reviewing each click and tap, it selects the one that took the longest. In this manner, INP provides a fair idea of how responsive your website is to actual visitors on an overall basis.
Understanding INP Scores
INP scores help you understand whether your website is performing with good INP or bad INP. You can do this analysis with the help of the INP scores. INP scores are measured in milliseconds (ms), which are tiny fractions of a second. Here’s a short guide to what different INP scores mean:
- Super Fast (200 ms or below): This is the golden area! Your website is incredibly responsive and fast, which keeps visitors happy and interested.
- Improvement Requirement (200–500 ms): It’s not bad, you can make some essential moderations. While some customers might face short delays, it is important to optimize your website for a more smooth user experience.
- That’s slow (More Than 500 ms): This is cause for worry! This high score shows that using your website is difficult and slow. It’s possible that your visitors and customers may become frustrated and go before ever seeing what you have to offer.
Hence, the most important lesson learned to is to analyse the INP score of your website. You should always ensure to have an INP of less than 200 ms. This guarantees that everyone visits your website quickly and easily, satisfying visitors and possibly increasing sales!
Common Causes of Slow INP
Now that we know what is INP, it’s importance, and how it is measured. Let’s understand some common causes which cause the slow INP of your website. Below mentioned are some of the following causes that can be the possible reasons.
- Heavy JavaScript: A website’s ability to respond to clicks and taps might be slowed down by having advanced code, particularly in the case of JavaScript.
- Massive Sections: Large images, movies, or other assets which take longer to load can cause th slow INP of your website. This makes the UI of your website unfriendly.
- Poor Coding/ design: The time it takes for a website to “redraw” itself after a click may increase if the design is very detailed or if coding is used poorly.
Tools for Checking Your INP Speed
There are tools like toolbox gadgets to help you check your INP score. Here are a few popular ones:
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Chrome DevTools: You can see what’s slowing down your website, including INP problems. This built-in tool is part of the Chrome browser.
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Google PageSpeed Insights: This free website grader from Google provides an INP score and other optimization advice.
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Real User Monitoring (RUM) Tools: Advanced devices that can track your INP and other user experience metrics over time are called Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools.
These are tools are highly credible and can be utilized on any website to measure the INP score.
Wrapping it up
Keep in mind, that INP is the indicator of your website responsiveness. Now that you know everything about Interaction Next Paint, INP you can simply consider it as the speedometer of your website.
A strong INP keeps users happy and engaged by making your website feel fast and responsive. However, a slow INP of a website is uncomfortable and slow.
Understanding and maximizing INP will help you maintain user satisfaction on your website, which may increase revenue. So, why do you avoid it? Check your INP now to speed up your website like a Master!
