Facebook’s News Feed to Webpages: Be Quick or Be Gone

News Feed will be updated to prioritize stories that load quickly on mobile at the expense of those that take longer

Facebook users have expressed a need for speed in News Feed, and the social network announced plans to oblige them “during the coming months.”

Engineers Jiayi Wen and Shengbo Guo announced in a Newsroom post that News Feed will be updated to prioritize stories that load quickly on mobile at the expense of those that take longer to load.

Wen and Guo said a delay of just three seconds causes 40 percent of website visitors to abandon sites on the internet as a whole, adding that the change to News Feed is aimed at enabling users to spend more time reading stories they find relevant.

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm will begin taking webpages’ estimated load times on the social network’s flagship mobile application into account, also factoring in users’ current connection speeds and the general speeds of the corresponding webpages.

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