Facebook made an announcement yesterday that it will soon be rolling out an update to its Newsfeed where people will be shown stories which are faster to load on their phones rather than frustrating slow links so that users can spend more time enjoying the stories they find relevant.
The social media giant seems to realize that it is highly annoying for us when we click on an attractive link in our newsfeed but it takes forever to load.
According to Facebook, almost 40% people abandon the link to a website after losing interest if it does not open within 3 seconds.
Considering Loading Time
To prioritize the links in the newsfeed, Facebook will take into consideration the loading time of different web pages depending upon multiple factors such as a user’s internet connectivity bandwidth and the general speed of the website.
If these factors indicate that a website will take longer to load than some other link it will go down in the priority list.
Impact on Webpages
Now the question is, will this impact webpages? Although Facebook states ‘we anticipate that most Pages won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed’, this announcement should be considered as a heads up for slow websites.
According to Facebook, there are still a few months before this update is rolled out to the newsfeed.
Facebook has also suggested some tips for publishers to make their webpages more efficient and user-friendly and asked them to avoid the potential decrease in the referral traffic in the upcoming months.
Click here for publisher best practices for improving mobile site load time.
