How fast should a small business website load?
Core Web Vitals in plain English: the speed thresholds Google publishes for LCP, INP and CLS, how to test your site, and what usually slows it down.
Read →Glossary
Also called: Interaction to Next Paint, responsiveness, FID, First Input Delay.
Interaction to Next Paint is the Core Web Vital for responsiveness. It watches the taps, clicks and key presses during a visit and reports one of the slowest delays between the action and the screen visibly reacting.
Google's thresholds: 200 milliseconds or less is good, up to 500 milliseconds needs improvement, and over 500 milliseconds is poor. INP replaced an older measure called First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024.
Slow INP is usually caused by too much JavaScript, the code that makes pages interactive, often from page builders, chat widgets, tracking scripts and pop-ups.
When someone taps ‘Call’ or opens your menu and nothing happens for a moment, they tap again, get confused or give up. On cheaper phones this lag is much worse, and those are exactly the customers you do not want to lose.
Example. A café's site has three chat and tracking plugins. On a budget Android phone, tapping the menu button freezes briefly. Removing two unused plugins brings INP into the good range.
Core Web Vitals · LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) · CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) · Page speed
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