Facebook has announced it will start penalising slow-loading webpages on its news feed, in the upcoming months.
The latest news feed changes will take into account the estimated load time of a webpage based on user click speeds from any link on their news feeds on the mobile app and the person’s current network connection. The information will reflect where it should appear on a user’s news feed.
Jiayi Wen, and Shengbo Guo, who are both engineers at Facebook, revealed the changes on the company’s blog stating:
‘Factors such as the person’s current network connection and the general speed of the corresponding web page will be considered. If signals indicate the web page will load quickly, the link to that web page might appear higher in your feed.’
Facebook’s content position changes will consider many factors, including, the users’ type of device and the speed of their mobile networks or Wi-Fi connection.
Wen and Guo explained how it will be implemented: ‘For example, if you are on a slower internet connection that won’t load videos, News Feed will show you fewer videos and more status updates and links. And to help load stories faster for people on slow or poor network connections, we prefetch stories by downloading mobile content before someone clicks a link, which we’ve seen can shorten load time for webpages by more than 25%.’
The aim behind the changes is to improve user experiences.
Following on they said: ‘We’ve heard from people that it’s frustrating to click on a link that leads to a slow-loading webpage. In fact, even more broadly on the internet, we’ve found that when people have to wait for a site to load for too long, they abandon what they were clicking on all together. As many as 40% of website visitors abandon a site after three seconds of delay.’
Pages on the platform which are slow-loading are likely to see a decrease in traffic, according to the company.
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