Facebook will prioritize faster-loading websites on its news feed
The platform will boost the reach of posts leading to organizations’ pages that load more quickly, meaning those that don’t ensure a good digital experience might be in trouble.
Looking to drive steady traffic to your site from Facebook? Better check your load times.
The social giant recently announced that changes to its news feed will favor faster-loading sites. Slow-loading pages will be punished, which probably means lower referral traffic numbers from the platform.
Facebook engineers Jiayi Wen and Shengbo Guo wrote about the update’s details in a blog post:
With this update, we’ll soon take into account the estimated load time of a webpage that someone clicks to from any link in News Feed on the mobile app. Factors such as the person’s current network connection and the general speed of the corresponding webpage will be considered. If signals indicate the webpage will load quickly, the link to that webpage might appear higher in your feed.
The changes are expected to take effect “over the coming months,” according to the blog post, and most pages “won’t see any significant changes” to their referral traffic.
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