Google is constantly making changes in ranking algorithms to provide a better user experience. To enhance the user experience further, Google recently announced Page Experience Update that contains a new ranking factor named Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals have three metrics including FID (First Input Delay) that measures user interactivity with the website.
Improving the FID score can lead to more visitors, improved bounce rate, and also increased number of leads or sales.
But what is FID?, what is a good FID score? How can you check your site’s FID score? and how can you improve your FID score? You will get answers to all these questions today in this article.
What Is FID?
FID stands for “First Input Delay”. It is a Core Web Vitals metric that measures the time a web browser takes to respond to a user’s action like clicking on any button or link on the web page. In other words, you can say FID is used to measure the interactivity between the users and web browsers.
Related: Core Web Vitals For Google SEO
Here is some important information related to FID:
- FID is measured in milliseconds.
- FID doesn’t include zooming and scrolling on the page.
- FID is rolled out as other Web Vitals metrics in May 2021.
FID Example
To understand FID, let’s have a look at one example below:
Let’s imagine you have entered a website in your web browser and clicked on a link or button, now you expect the website to respond as soon as possible but unfortunately, the site failed to respond to your action. In this case, most of the users leave the website and because of this, the site owner loses customers.
That’s why it is also known as a metric to measure users’ experience with the web page.
Importance of FID
Here is why improving FID score is essential for your website:
- FID gives webmasters another way to optimize the site for better rankings.
- Not optimizing FID can make you lose lots of visitors as users leave websites that don’t respond fast.
- As Google has already rolled out Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor and FID is also a part of Web Vitals, it is very essential for every website owner to look into it to keep their site optimized.
- If you don’t optimize your site for FID, then you can also lose your marketing efforts and ROI.
- Poor First Input Delay is also a reason for poor bounce rate and decreased page sessions.
Related: Steps To Optimize Your Site For Core Web Vitals
Reasons For Poor FID Score?
One of the biggest reasons why your FID score is poor is “JavaScript execution of heavy files”. When any site loads and can’t respond to the user’s action then it is most probably loading some JavaScript or CSS files or elements.
Here are some reasons for slow FID score that are also related to JavaScript execution:
- The site is loading heavy JavaScript files in the main thread, in other words, the main thread is busy with other execution. That’s why browsers don’t respond until all the JavaScript execution is completed.
- If your site contains heavy codes that are not optimized then this can also lead to poor FID score.
- All the JavaScript files are render-blocking by default that means if the browser encounters an external JavaScript file then it stops all the current tasks and starts loading the JavaScript first and until it completes, the user has to wait for a response. Hence, you should always remove unused JavaScript from the website.
What Is a Good FID Score?
Similar to other metrics, the FID score is also divided into three brackets as described below.
Good: A good FID needs to have a 100 millisecond or less score.
Needs Improvement: If the FID score is between 100ms to 300ms then it needs improvement.
Poor: If your site scores FID above 300ms then it comes under the poor category, meaning, you should immediately need to improve your FID score.
How To Measure FID Score?
As FID is a field metric, it can be only measured with a few tools as described below:
PageSpeed Insights
To measure FID using the PageSpeed Insights tool, enter your website URL in the given box as seen in the image below.
Now, you will see a report containing the website speed, filed data, lab data, and also opportunities to improve site performance.
As you can see in the above image, SEJ has an FID score of 30ms which is below 100ms, which means the site is providing a good user experience.
Related: Website Speed Test Tools
Search Console
You can also use Google Search Console to measure FID. Simply, login to your account and select the website that you want to check FID, and go to “Core Web Vitals” under “Experience” as shown in the image below.
Here, you can check FID for both mobile and desktop. In our case, we are checking for mobile.
In the above image, you can see that we have 58 pages that are affected by the FID issue. To see these URLs, you just need to scroll down a little bit.
Related: Page Experience Report In Google Search Console
Chrome Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an inbuilt tool in Chrome that can be used to measure the FID of any site. To start using it, first, you need to open the website in the browser, then go to inspect by right-clicking the mouse and clicking on “Lighthouse” as shown in the image below.
Now click on the “Generate report” button and Lighthouse will start measuring the performance of the website.
After some time, you can see a report similar to the image below.
Related: Tools To Perform Core Web Vitals Test
How To Improve FID Score?
Here are some of the ways to improve your FID score:
- You can reduce and optimize third-party codes and scripts like analytics and social media buttons to reduce the website load time.
- Minimize unused polyfills, a polyfill is a piece of code that is used by sites to work properly on old web browsers. Modern browsers don’t need these polyfills so you should minimize the use of them.
- Another way of improving FID is to minify, compress, and remove unused CSS files from your site.
- You can run long tasks in the background instead of the main thread. Here, Web Worker can help you run JavaScript on a background thread.
- Like CSS, you can remove unused JavaScript. Here, you can take the help of Chrome DevTools which shows you the JavaScript codes that you don’t need.
- Caching is also an effective way of improving the loading speed. In this method, you can store content on the user’s browser, and the next time when the user visits your site, the browser will not download the content again as it’s already stored in the cookie.
Related: Ways to Improve Your SEO Fast
Some Useful Plugins That Can Be Used To Improve Your FID Score
Here are some top WordPress plugins that you can use to improve the FID score of your WordPress site:
1- WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a caching plugin for WordPress that helps you speed up your WordPress site by minifying and compressing JavaScript. Simply minify the JavaScript files to reduce the size of the files to improve the FID score.
2- PerfMatters
PerfMatters is a paid plugin for WordPress that helps you optimize and reduce JavaScript execution. You just need to install it on your WordPress site and then, you can turn off the JavaScript that you no longer need from the “Script Manager”.
3- Autoptimize
Autoptimize is the best free alternative to WP Rocket. Autoptimize can perform several optimizations for your site like minifying, caching, and optimizing inline CSS. Also, you have an option to enable lazy-loading for the images.
4- Hummingbird
Hummingbird is an all-in-one plugin to make your website faster. By using it, you can perform file caching, compression, defer CSS, minify JavaScript, and also do lazy-loading. Hummingbird is a free plugin.
5- WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize has over 1 million installs on WordPress which means it is one of the recommended plugins to improve FID score. The useful feature of WP-Optimize is that you can defer JavaScript and CSS that reduces the website’s first paint.
Related: Best Ways To Increase Site Speed
Conclusion
If you still haven’t optimized the FID score of your site then you should start optimizing it at the earliest. The lower the FID score, the more visitors engagement you will have on your site. By implementing all the above recommendations, you will definitely enhance the First Input Delay score of your site.
Still, have problems? Comment below.
