A few years ago, Google emailed me to say that my Text Collector site was too slow. Would be a shame if somebody delisted it.

From: Google Search Console Team <sc-noreply@google.com>

Subject: Core Web Vitals INP issues detected on your sites

Google is transitioning to a new metric to measure the responsiveness of sites, Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which will replace FID as a Core Web Vital in March 2024.

Search Console has detected your sites have INP issues in the following properties. Click a property in the following list to open the INP report for that property (max 10 properties shown):

• legaltextcollector.com
• https://www.legaltextcollector.com/

We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. This, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward.¹

PageSpeed Insights gives a Chrome’s-eye view of responsiveness on my docs index page. At the time of the email, my “interaction to next paint” was in the “warning” range at 298 milliseconds:

I wonder how Google’s home page measures up:

So Google’s flagship property, on their own test, scores just as badly as my page. I wonder if their “core ranking systems” will also punish google.com.

Hold on, you might say, “They have a page with a text input field on it.” Maybe text input is NP-Hard? Don’t judge till you try something comparable, like DuckDuckGo; surely they’ll be…

…twice as fast. I guess dieting on billions of monopoly dollars makes Google lethargic.

Adapted from Bacchus by Gustav Sundblad - copyleft.

For that matter, my page did better than Google’s on their “first input delay” metric, but that was my docs page — it has lots of visible stuff like text instead of just a one-field form. Maybe the extra text lubricates its trip through the Tubes or something. Besides, the email didn’t point to a specific page; maybe it was blaming my home page, so let’s check that. Inp is the same, but look at that fid!

Why is first input delay so bad on my home page when it’s good on my docs page? It couldn’t be because my home page embeds a video hosted on another Google property, right?