Facebook To Favor Faster Websites In Its News Feed Rankings

In this day and age, Facebook has basically become a Don for internet publications. They need its blessing and permission in order to thrive, drawing traffic from its sweet pool of over 2 billion global users. So when the social media network announced that it would start favoring websites with faster loading on its News Feed rankings, it’s a good bet that it caused a wave of anxiety among hundreds of sites.

As Facebook noted in its own announcement post regarding the matter, the social network made it a point to highlight the benefits of making one’s website load faster once users click on their links. It would seem that this change disproportionately benefits sites that make use of Instant Article as well, which only makes sense since this is Facebook.

“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,” the post reads. “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.”

Fortunately for all publishers involved, these changes won’t be instantaneous. By giving sites a few months for the rollout to be completed, they have enough time to make the necessary changes, Tech Crunch reports. On that note, the publication mentions how odd it is for the Instant Article format to have no mention at all on the blog post.

This is odd since the feature is made specifically for this kind of issue. By stripping away unnecessary codes, users can immediately see what the content of the page is about. Then again, the feature does also get rid of the ads that the publications might have included on the page that is being loaded, so that might explain why so many sites are hesitant to make use of it.