As of March 2024, Google is transitioning to the use of a new metric to measure the responsiveness of websites. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) assesses responsiveness using data from the Event Timing API. When an interaction causes a page to become unresponsive, that is a poor user experience. INP observes the latency of all interactions a user has made with the page, and reports a single value which all (or nearly all) interactions were below. A low INP means the page was consistently able to respond quickly to all—or the vast majority—of user interactions.

Chrome usage data shows that 90% of a user’s time on a page is spent after it loads, Thus, careful measurement of responsiveness throughout the page lifecycle is important. This is what the INP metric assesses.

Good responsiveness means that a page responds quickly to interactions made with it. When a page responds to an interaction, the result is visual feedback, which is presented by the browser in the next frame the browser presents. Visual feedback tells you if, for example, an item you add to an online shopping cart is indeed being added, whether a mobile navigation menu has opened, if a login form’s contents are being authenticated by the server, and so forth.

Some interactions will naturally take longer than others, but for especially complex interactions, it’s important to quickly present some initial visual feedback as a cue to the user that something is happening. The time until the next paint is the earliest opportunity to do this. Therefore, the intent of INP is not to measure all the eventual effects of the interaction (such as network fetches and UI updates from other asynchronous operations), but the time in which the next paint is being blocked. By delaying visual feedback, you may be giving users the impression that the page is not responding to their actions.

The goal of INP is to ensure the time from when a user initiates an interaction until the next frame is painted is as short as possible, for all or most interactions the user makes.

What is a good INP score?

Pinning labels such as “good” or “poor” on a responsiveness metric is difficult. On one hand, you want to encourage development practices that prioritize good responsiveness. On the other hand, you must account for the fact that there’s considerable variability in the capabilities of devices people use to set achievable development expectations.

To ensure you’re delivering user experiences with good responsiveness, a good threshold to measure is the 75th percentile of page loads recorded in the field, segmented across mobile and desktop devices:

• An INP below or at 200 milliseconds means that your page has good responsiveness.
• An INP above 200 milliseconds and below or at 500 milliseconds means that your page’s responsiveness needs improvement.
• An INP above 500 milliseconds means that your page has poor responsiveness.

How Google’s Current PageSpeed Insights is Measuring Sites for Core Web Vitals?

One of the major factors behind the push to INP and some of other Google’s Search Indexing criteria is based upon the change in user devices. Mobile devices have now met and has begun to exceed 60% of all internet traffic. Google’s current tool PageSpeed Insights for mobile analysis is loading an assumption that the user is emulating Moto G powered device with Lighthouse 11.0.0 operating system, with a Slow 4G internet connection. So with these factors in play your website needs to be not over burdened with used and unused code on it pages, images properly sized, compressed and in the proper formats for quick loading and on a fast web server, along with other tools to get a “Good” score. It is suspected that websites with low scores will be placed in search below websites with higher scores. The Website’s Score needs to be 90 + to be considered good! anything below that needs work like this example, or this one .

What does this mean to Vacation Rental Website Owners?

Having a website that includes one that is “Heavy” in code, features and Displays a Gallery or galleries of images it is going to be difficult to pull off acceptable scores. I personally know many Owners that would rather and try to get more direct bookings than to rely on VRBO, AirBnB, Booking.com etc. but without a properly setup website, have the ability to and knowledge on how to fix the issues your website has and be on a Hosting Platform or Server that can give you the results you need.

Some of the Providers out there selling Owners on “Website Builders” may not be doing us justice unless they plan to modify their builder to meet the changes in technology, Owners are going to find themselves with only few options to get traffic to their existing vacation rental website; Being a Hawk on Facebook groups where people are looking to try to stay away form Booking Agents, or Start Advertising with Pay-Per-Click campaigns, etc.

Where Does IMC WebHost Come In?

Being a Vacation Rental Website Owner, I ran into these same options. I received some advance notice these changes were coming. Our existing website “Landing Pages” were well below the 90+ score needed to be in the “Good” on the performance score. Since I had experience building websites, hosting websites and the server technologies, I knew that I had to use every bit of my experience to keep my pathway to obtaining 70%+ direct bookings. I went a little different in direction.

So I rebuilt our website, built the servers and now able to easily spin out a 94 and better score on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. I now have available space on my servers, so I can take on a few other Owners and Host their websites on these servers also. Most Shared servers will be packed with 400 or more websites. The whole idea behind my plan was to be using super-fast servers with the best software in them so they stay nimble and super-fast. That also means highly restricting the number of sites that would be hosted.

There are 2 Plans; a Business Plan and Ecommerce Plan. The main difference between the two is the Business plan connects to another booking management system like OwnerRez, lodgify, etc. The Ecommerce plan has a bit more in capabilities to satisfy hosting a site that also has its own Reservation system within it.

Review the plans, then send your website’s property pages through PageSpeed Insights and review its score. If it isn’t making the grade, you know what choices you have now. If you decide to go with the Hosting change route we’ll be speaking in the near future to make the change. We can help with the other fixes or “Tune Up” so your site will be in the 90’s too.