Only 48% of mobile websites pass Google's Core Web Vitals

A visitor on a phone taps the menu button. Nothing happens. They tap again, and the menu opens and closes in the same moment. That half second is what Google's responsiveness metric now measures.

On March 12, 2024, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) as the Core Web Vitals metric for responsiveness. FID only looked at the delay before the first interaction on a page could start. INP looks at the clicks, taps and key presses across the whole visit, and reports one of the slowest.

What counts as good

Google's web.dev guide sets the thresholds. An INP of 200 milliseconds or less is good. Above 500 milliseconds is poor. Anything between needs improvement. The value is taken at the 75th percentile of real page loads, with mobile and desktop counted separately, so a fast office laptop does not cover for a slow phone.

Search Console's Core Web Vitals report switched from FID to INP on the same date. On ranking, Google's page experience documentation is direct: "Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems." The same page adds that good scores in these reports do not guarantee a top position.

Where websites stand

The HTTP Archive's Web Almanac 2025, published on January 15, 2026, measured millions of sites using July 2025 data from the Chrome UX Report.

Desktop is close to solved. Phones are where sites fail.

Popular sites do worse on INP, which surprises people. Among the 1,000 most visited sites, 63% have good INP on mobile. Among the top 10,000 it is 56%. The report's explanation is more features, richer interaction and heavier third-party integrations. A company website that has picked up a chat widget, a tag manager, two analytics tools and an animation library is on the same path.

Where the time goes

Web.dev splits every interaction into three parts.

1. Input delay: the tap waits because the browser's main thread is busy with something else, often a script that has nothing to do with the tap.
2. Processing: the code that responds to the tap runs.
3. Presentation delay: the browser draws the next frame that shows the result.

How to check your own site

Open the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. It groups URLs by status and shows INP for real visitors. If the site has too little traffic for that report, PageSpeed Insights shows the same Chrome field data where Google has it.

Then use the site on a mid-range phone the way a customer would. Open the menu, switch tabs, submit the contact form, all while the page is still loading. If something feels sticky, it probably measures that way too.

Questions worth asking whoever builds or runs your site:

1. What is our INP on mobile in Search Console, and which pages are worst?
2. Which third-party scripts load on every page, and does each one still earn its place?
3. Do the scroll effects and animations run while the page is still loading, and what happens to a tap during that time?

We wrote about the loading side of the same question, Largest Contentful Paint, in our piece on scroll driven video heroes. A page can show its hero image in time and still answer taps slowly, and INP is the part of the score that catches that.