Facebook News Feed will soon start rank faster loading websites higher

Facebook recently announced it will soon be rolling out a change to its News Feed that will increase the distribution of links to faster loading web pages. The change will negatively impact Pages whose links load more slowly, the company also notes.

The update to News Feed will roll out gradually in the months ahead, giving publishers time to make the necessary adjustments.

The Instant Article format was designed to make reading news stories via Facebook a better experience for mobile users. It does this by stripping out extraneous code that can bog mobile web pages down, while also placing restrictions on the number of ads they can display, among other things.

The format hasn’t been universally adopted by publishers, many of who feel that Instant Articles decrease their ability to generate revenue from their sites.

Despite the fact that Facebook doesn’t directly state that Instant Articles are about to get a big boost from this Newsfeed change, it’s pretty clear that will be the case.

It won’t necessarily rank Instant Articles any higher than other fast-loading sites, but it certainly means those publishers using Facebook’s mobile web format won’t have to worry that they’ll soon lose clicks.

According to Facebook’s announcement, the company will take into account the estimated load time of a webpage when someone clicks a link in the News Feed on the Facebook mobile app.

It will also consider other factors, like the user’s current network connection speed along with the general speed of the web page in question. If the link loads more quickly, then Facebook will make sure the link gets a higher position in your News Feed.

When the updated News Feed algorithm is rolled out, Facebook warns that web pages that are “particularly slow” will likely see decreases in traffic.

Slower loading web pages, of course, are frustrating for end users. As Facebook points out, on the broader web, as many as 40 percents of website visitors abandon a site if there’s a three-second delay.