Interaction to Next Paint What INP measures, what the value consists of and how tags and consent banners determine it
Interaction to Next Paint measures how quickly a page responds to input. The metric replaced First Input Delay in March 2024 and is considerably stricter: it no longer rates only the start of processing of the first input, but every interaction during the visit up to the visible response. Since then, it has been the value among the Core Web Vitals that hits platforms with many scripts.
Threshold: 200 millisecondsOwn data: as of August 2026
The three parts of an interaction: input delay, processing, presentation
Three phases lie between the click and the visible response. Input delay is the time until the browser can process the input at all. It grows when the main thread is busy running a script. Processing duration is the time the responsible event handler itself needs. Presentation delay is the time until the next rendered frame, during which layout and recalculation take place.
Measurement covers the entire visit, and roughly the worst interaction is rated. This exposes exactly the case that an average hides: nine hundred fast clicks and one stall when opening the filter.
Tags, consent banners and large bundles drive the INP value
The order by frequency in projects: the consent banner, which loads and executes scripts on the first click; the tag manager, whose rules fire on every interaction; frontend bundles that ship more code than a feature needs; and expensive event handlers that recalculate on every input instead of caching results.
All four rarely appear in the project plan. They arise along the way, through campaigns, marketing requirements and testing tools, and they gradually worsen the value over quarters.
Optimize INP: five measures that relieve the main thread
- An inventory of all third-party scripts with their blocking time in milliseconds, recorded in the field and not in the lab.
- Split long tasks so that the main thread can respond to input between the parts.
- Defer work that is not immediately visible until after the next paint.
- Decouple the consent logic: it may decide what is loaded, but it must not accompany every interaction.
- Introduce an approval process for new tags, checked against the performance budget. Otherwise every improvement is used up after two quarters.
INP in the field: AEM and Magnolia websites in the DACH region
In Christian Schreiber's own survey of 364 AEM websites with real-user data, 83.4 percent are in the green range. For Magnolia, it is 91.0 percent of 148. The median is 116 and 118 milliseconds respectively. Both systems deliver server-side rendered pages, which pays off here.
This sets the order of work: on classically delivered platforms, input responsiveness is rarely the first area to address. It becomes one as soon as a frontend framework takes over delivery or the number of tags grows. On classically delivered platforms, work usually starts with Time to First Byte and Largest Contentful Paint. Where tags and scripts come into play on the individual systems is described in Adobe Experience Manager Performance and Magnolia CMS Performance. The distribution across all metrics is in the Core Web Vitals Benchmark.
Measuring INP: only field data shows real interactions
A lab measurement loads the page without a consent banner, without a tag manager and without real interaction. The very components that determine this value are therefore missing from the measurement. The value only becomes reliable with field data or with real user monitoring that captures the interactions of real visitors. The tools that do this are listed under Measuring Core Web Vitals.
Book a free performance analysis
30 minutes via video call. You see which scripts determine the input responsiveness of your pages.
Frequently asked questions about Interaction to Next Paint
What does Interaction to Next Paint measure?
The time between an input and the next visible response of the page, measured across the entire visit. Instead of the average, roughly the worst interaction is rated, so that individual stalls are not lost. Good is 200 milliseconds, poor is anything above 500.
How does INP relate to First Input Delay?
Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay in March 2024. First Input Delay only measured the delay until processing of the first input began and was therefore good almost everywhere. The new value additionally covers the processing itself and the presentation, and it applies to every interaction in the visit.
What does the value consist of?
Three parts: the input delay until the browser gets to processing at all, the processing duration of the responsible event handler and the time until the next frame on screen. All three suffer when the main thread of the browser is busy.
Why is the value worse than expected on large platforms?
Because a considerable part of the delivered JavaScript does not come from the project, but from the tag manager, consent banner, analytics, chat and testing tools. Each one can be justified, but together they occupy the main thread. An inventory of all third-party scripts with their blocking time is therefore the most revealing part of an assessment.
How does this value look in the DACH region?
Better than expected. In Christian Schreiber's own survey, 83.4 percent of websites on Adobe Experience Manager and 91.0 percent of Magnolia websites are in the green range. For both systems, the bottleneck is the main content load time, not input responsiveness.