In its quest to provide its visitors with the best user experience possible, Facebook has started scanning websites to assess their loading speed. As forty percent of users abandon a website after waiting more than three seconds for a page to load, Facebook’s algorithm (which determines what users see and what they don’t ) will now start giving prominence only to links to websites with a fast loading speed on mobile devices on users’ feeds.
In Facebook’s words “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.”
If you want to improve your website’s speed, you can execute these 10 Speed Best Practices recommended directly by Facebook:
- Minimize landing page redirects, plugins, and link shorteners;
- Compress files to decrease mobile rendering time;
- Improve server response time by utilizing multi region hosting;
- Remove render-blocking javascript;
- Use a high-quality content delivery network to reach your audience quickly;
- Remove redundant data that does not impact how the page is processed by the browser;
- Optimize images to reduce file size without diminishing visual quality;
- Reduce the size of above the fold content to prioritize visual content;
- Use asynchronous scripts to streamline page render time;
- Dynamically adjust the content for slower connections/devices;