Facebook has announced a tweak to its news feed that will penalize slow-loading web pages in order to increase the visibility of links to faster-loading pages. In other words, “Websites that are particularly slow could see decreases in referral traffic.”
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What Does This Mean for Instant Articles?
Facebook will estimate the amount of time it takes a web page to load from its mobile app and use those estimates to rank pages on news feeds.
Facebook’s Instant Articles are designed to make reading stories on Facebook a better experience for users, which includes increasing the load speed. The platform achieves this by stripping out code that can cause lag and limiting the number of ads, among other things.
But the format hasn’t been universally adopted. Many publishers feel that Instant Articles makes it harder for them to generate revenue from their websites.
Recently, Facebook made some edits to make publishers more comfortable. For instance, they can now show more ads, Google AMP and Apple News formats have been integrated into the platform, the previously stripped subscription options have been restored, and tests for a paid subscription paywall product will begin in the fall.
Yet despite the recent efforts to make the platform more appealing, Facebook makes no mention of Instant Articles in their blog post about slow-loading pages.
How Facebook Plans to Improve Page Load Times
To ensure a fair game, Facebook will take into account several factors that impact loading times. For instance, a user’s network connection may affect how fast their device loads a page. Facebook will consider this and the general speed of the page itself.
The blog post also highlights the efforts taken by Facebook in the past to ensure that people see stories faster. For people with poor or slow network connections, “we pre-fetch stories by downloading mobile content before someone clicks a link, which we’ve seen can shorten load time for webpages by more than 25%.”
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Time to Prepare for Changes
The update will be rolled out over the coming months, which gives publishers time to prepare. In addition, Facebook will be publishing and updating a “best practices” guide to educate publishers on how to make the update work in their favor. The guide includes techniques to reduce the page-load time as well as tools to use to check the speed.
