Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are coming out later this year, will provide ways to quantify the user experience and identify areas that need improvement. Interactivity is one of the signals to be measured along with page load time and the stability of content as it loads. The key is to focus on optimizing your website for the quality of your user’s experience.
In this article, we will define the interactivity metric, why it is important, how it is measured, and ways you can improve your site’s user experience.
What is the Interactivity signal?
The new metric that looks at interactivity is the First Input Delay (FID). It measures the time when a user first interacts with your page. For example, a user lands on your website and the page starts to load. How long before your “register here” button is clickable?
To be classified in the good range your FID should be less than 100 milliseconds.
Why is it important?
Google highly values sites that offer a good user experience over those that do not. Improving the user experience will improve engagement, which is what you need for conversion.
Remember that Google is in business to give the user the best search results and does not want to deliver a site that does not have a good user experience.
Google will use this data when they are trying to evaluate two very similar results. If all other things are equal in terms of content, Google will likely use something like the Core Web Vitals to make an ultimate determination. ~ezoic
Improve your site’s user experience
If you use WordPress, your plugins can be a source of increased FID times. This ironically includes speed optimization plugins, especially if you have multiples on your site because they are making external calls at the same time.
Adding a lot of code to the head of your site that calls a log of external javascript can also slow your FID.
Basically, if you are using tools delivered by plugins or snippets of code to the header, you should evaluate how much the tools are hurting your FID scores. The more unnecessary javascript you remove from your site head code the better. See if any can be turned off or deferred to only be active on pages they are used.
