Facebook's forthcoming changes to News Feed to favour web sites that load faster

Facebook announced yesterday that it will soon be rolling out a change to its News Feed that will increase the distribution of links to faster loading web pages. They will include those that used its own Instant Article format, it seems according to commentators.

The change will negatively impact Pages whose links loaded more slowly, Facebook also noted.

The update to News Feed is set for a gradual roll out in the months ahead, which will give publishers the time to make the necessary adjustments.

However, Facebook's blog post does not make a mention of Instant Articles, despite the obvious connection between Facebook's own speedier mobile web format and its desire to increase distribution of links pointing to faster websites, commentators point out.

They say Instant Article format was designed to make reading news stories via Facebook a better experience on mobile devices, thanks to its ability to strip out extraneous code that could slow down mobile web pages, while also placing restrictions on the number of ads they could display, among other things.

Many publishers have not adopted the format yet as they felt that Instant Articles decreased their ability to generate revenue from their sites.

Facebook had though started fixing some of the problems publishers had been complaining about.

Meanwhile, in a blog post, Facebook engineers Jiayi Wen and Shengbo Guo said the change was in response to frustrations from the Facebook community over slow-loading websites.

According to Facebook's engineers, 40 per cent of people would not wait over three seconds for a page to load, and Facebook wanted to make sure people could spend more time reading the stuff they wanted.

To ensure this, the social network said it will consider the speed of their network connection, and the general speed of a website. If both the connection and the site were slow, the link would rank lower in users' News Feed.