Facebook updates News Feed to prioritize faster loading stories

Facebook is updating its News Feed algorithm in favor of fast loading web pages. In the 'coming months', the social network will begin filtering articles, ranking faster loading web pages higher in the News Feed while showing fewer stories that might take longer to load.

"We’ve heard from people that it’s frustrating to click on a link that leads to a slow-loading webpage. In fact, even more broadly on the internet, we’ve found that when people have to wait for a site to load for too long, they abandon what they were clicking on all together. As many as 40 percent of website visitors abandon a site after three seconds of delay," Facebook wrote on its blog post.

Though Facebook says the change will allow people to "spend more time reading the stories they find relevant," notably, it's also a way to push publishers to its Instant Articles format. Launched in 2016, Instant Articles lets publishers create faster-loading, interactive articles on the social network.

The social network says it will gauge the speed on a handful of factors, including the quality of your own internet connection as well as the overall load times for a given page. The company anticipates that most Pages won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in the News Feed, but also warns that “particularly slow” webpages could see decreases in referral traffic.