As expected, although it took a lot longer than we thought, Google announced it will be replacing the FID metric with the INP metric for its Core Web Vitals. This won’t happen until March 2024, but it will happen.
Martin Splitt from Google announced, “the Chrome team decided to promote INP as the new Core Web Vitals metric for responsiveness, effective March 2024, replacing FID.”
Here is the timeline:
The Google Search Console Core Web Vitals report will include INP in the Core Web Vitals report later this year, he said. “When INP replaces FID in March 2024, the Search Console report will stop showing FID metrics and use INP as the new metric for responsiveness,” he added.
INP is a metric that aims to represent a page’s overall interaction latency by selecting one of the single longest interactions that occur when a user visits a page. For pages with less than 50 interactions in total, INP is the interaction with the worst latency. For pages with many interactions, INP is most often the 98th percentile of interaction latency.
More on INP can be found here and how to optimize for it can be found here.
Just keep in mind, page experience is not a system, but rather a good page experience is part of the overall core ranking system. “Good stats within the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console or third-party Core Web Vitals reports don’t guarantee good rankings,” Splitt wrote.
I did joke with John Mueller about this on Mastodon:
So don’t worry about it, unless you are looking for a new way to bill your clients for work.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
