Google looks at how fast and smooth your website feels when it decides how to rank pages. It does this with a small set of tests called Core Web Vitals. On 12 March 2024, Google swapped one of those tests for a new and tougher one. If your website feels slow when people tap a button or open a menu, this change matters to you.
What Changed on 12 March
The old test was called First Input Delay. It only looked at the very first tap or click on a page, and it only measured part of the wait. Most websites passed it easily.
The new test is called Interaction to Next Paint, or INP for short. It measures how long it takes for the page to visibly react after someone taps, clicks or types. For example, when a customer taps "Add to cart", how long is it before something changes on the screen? INP watches every tap and click during the whole visit, not just the first one, and reports one of the slowest.
Google sorts the results into three groups:
- Good: the page reacts in 200 milliseconds or less. That is one fifth of a second, which feels instant to most people.
- Needs improvement: the page takes longer than 200 milliseconds, up to half a second.
- Poor: the page takes more than half a second to react.
Why It Matters for Your Business
A page that freezes for a moment after a tap feels broken. People tap again, give up, or leave for a competitor. That costs you enquiries and sales, especially from people browsing on their phones.
Page experience is only one of many things Google considers, and good content still matters most. But when two pages are similar, the one that feels faster has an edge. A faster site is also simply nicer to use, whatever Google thinks.
How to Check Your Website
You can check your score for free in two places:
- PageSpeed Insights: go to pagespeed.web.dev, type in your web address and look for "Interaction to Next Paint" near the top. These numbers come from real visitors using Google Chrome. A small or new website may not have enough visitors yet to show a result.
- Google Search Console: if your website is set up in Search Console, open the Core Web Vitals report. It shows which of your pages are good, which need improvement and which are poor, for both phones and computers.
What Usually Slows a Page Down
A slow reaction normally means the phone or computer is busy running other code on the page when someone taps. The most common causes we see are:
- Too many add-ons: on WordPress websites, each plugin (an add-on that gives the site an extra feature) can add its own code. A few heavy ones can slow every page.
- Chat widgets: live chat boxes often load a lot of code, even for people who never use them.
- Sliders and carousels: rotating banners at the top of a page are often heavy and rarely help sales.
- Tracking and advertising code: every extra tracking tag runs in the visitor's browser and competes for attention.
- Page builders: some drag-and-drop design tools produce bulky pages that take longer to respond.
The fix is usually to remove what you don't need, swap heavy tools for lighter ones, and load less important code later, after the page is ready to use.
How We Can Help
At IDM2, we check how quickly websites react, find out what is slowing them down and fix it, without losing the features you rely on. If your INP score is "needs improvement" or "poor", or you are not sure where to look, our website design and development team in Port Melbourne can help. We can also look at how speed fits into your wider SEO. Get in touch and we will take a look.