INP took over from FID in 2024, and it has been getting more important month by month. So what is INP?

Briefly: it is the time between the moment a user interacts with your page (a click, a tap or a keyboard input) and the moment the browser gives that interaction a visual answer by painting the next frame.

Speed Is Not Just Painting Over the White Screen

Technical SEO may count for less than it used to, and E-E-A-T may have climbed fast, but a fast site still leaves a valuable impression. What has changed is that speed can no longer be reduced to LCP the way it once was. Painting over the white screen quickly (FCP) matters, getting your main element on screen (LCP) matters more, and how your site answers the user has now become critical in its own right.

We do not think INP is as important as LCP, by the way. But that should not be read as LCP being important and INP being trivial; both are critical numbers.

Do not think of a good INP as something you do for the search engine alone. It matters just as much for the experience. A user who reached your site quickly will not want to wait around after tapping your menu. If the response comes late, you do not have much time left; the user can lose the will to stay and move between your pages. So even setting aside how much weight Google gives INP, a poor score is already hurting your SEO, directly and indirectly.

Brilliant Caching May Not Save You

Picture it this way: you have built a brilliant caching setup, but all it does is stretch out the meeting between a long, step-by-step site and the customer. A font swap or a deferred script can make that “brilliant” JavaScript feature respond late, and then the feature only does your site harm. If that huge block of code locks the main thread the moment a user interacts, your INP score collapses.

Code: We Should Look For the Problem in Ourselves

This is where we have to look for the problem in ourselves. With TTFB the main suspect is your hosting provider; with INP, I have to say the real issue is a site that was put together badly.

So pick up the keyboard and start making use of AI in 2026. Move your site to localhost and start getting help from the AI-assisted editors: Antigravity, Cursor or the AI features in VS Code. WordPress themes and plugins lose support and updates a little more every day, and your site may have slowed down because of it. Finding a single cause for INP is not easy. JavaScript is the first suspect, but it can also be a problem with your database or too little RAM allocated to your site. Either way, you need to look deep into your own source code.

The Ideal Numbers and the Hosting Factor

The number to aim for with INP is under 200ms. If everything looks fine and the score still will not move, your hosting provider is the suspect. It can hurt you in two ways, and there is a third, hidden one in the database that never shows up in the code.

  1. Your site does not have enough RAM.
  2. The servers are under heavy load.
  3. Your database has a problem.

You may think your site is fast from your own observations, but from what we have seen in SEO work, visitor hours matter a great deal. For instance, if half your visitors arrive between 16:00 and 20:00 and the server is busy at that hour, your PageSpeed reading comes back above 200ms. Because half your visitors are living through that slowness themselves.

WordPress sites with a lot of content unfortunately bloat over time, and that slows your site down badly.

Check your INP:

In the Türk SEM PageSpeed section you can see how INP, FCP, LCP and CLS move over time, as in the image above.

Correction: a small fix was made to LCP and FCP. (1 February 2026)