The internet has been focused on load times and website speed for a long time now, and now Facebook is joining the bandwagon. In their latest newsroom post the social media giant announced yet another Facebook News Feed update which will focus on showing links to faster loading pages first.
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.
This News Feed update will start to roll out gradually over the course of the next few months, and assuming you’ve been keeping up with the recent focus on website load times – you probably won’t notice much of a change. However, if for some reason you’ve been neglecting your website’s load times – now is the perfect time to start focusing on that. Start off by checking your hosting server speed with the help of Bitcatcha. Then run a test using the latest Google Pagespeed test tool. Now, with your data in front of you, start optimizing! For those of you optimizing a WordPress website, check out my suggestions for 5 great optimization plugins here. Furthermore, Facebook maintains their own set of guidelines for an optimized mobile experience here.