Page Experience Tutorial - Improving First Input Delay

Last Month Google released the second video in their Getting Started With Page Experience series. This one focuses on Improving First Input Delay (FID).

"Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression," Google says it's worth "perfecting" your FID to provide a "great page experience."

FID, one of the three Core Web Vitals, measures how long it takes in milliseconds for your site to react after someone interacts with it by clicking a button or tapping on a text input. In other words, FID measures the delay in processing data and interactions, not the time it actually takes to process that data. Think of it as how long it takes for your page to feel like it's interactive, the time it takes to be responsive to the user the very first time they use it.

And, just like every other part of the Page Experience algorithm, each and every one of the URLs on your site are scored independently — directly based on what actual users are experiencing with your site.

This means that, while your homepage may have fantastic values, your product or article pages might not. It's important to understand that every page (i.e., URL) is an island and the FID performance on one page does not affect any other page. The numbers you see in the Page Experience report, available within your Google Search Console (GSC), reflect the performance scores coming from the monthly chrome user experience report and are based on the metrics that actual users are experiencing with your page.

Therefore the only way to get a truly accurate measurement of FID or any of the other Core Web Vitals is from real world users via your own analytics or else the ones that you have the ability to access inside of the core web vitals report section of GSC.

If you haven't already, you should go ahead and create a free