Last August, Facebook announced that it would be making changes to its News Feed algorithm that favors fast loading websites. What does this mean for slow loading websites? If your business is among the unfortunate slow loading websites, Facebook will show fewer links to your website in its News Feed.
By now you have probably noticed less visibility of links to your website in Facebook’s New Feed. You wrote great articles and shared awesome videos, but couldn’t seem to find your links or they appeared nearly at the bottom of the News Feeds. You should check your website’s speed.
Facebook has a lot of influence over which sites are shown to you in your News Feed. And now Facebook favors fast loading websites indicating site speed as a criteria. However, the social media giant has provided helpful tips for site owners and developers to improve their site’s loading time.
You no doubt have Facebook share buttons on your website; most sites do. Facebook provides a fairly high amount of traffic to websites if your site loads fast. The speed of your website mostly has to do with your hosting provider. Is your website hosted on a shared server, VPS or dedicated server?
While shared hosting service is an economical way to get your site on the web, you have options to switch your hosting plan. Or better yet, change hosting companies altogether if they are not suited to hosting WordPress sites or other types of content management sites.
Some shared hosting providers literally have thousands of websites on one server. Some of these sites are high traffic. This means your website is amongst a herd waiting for it’s turn to be shown to the world. May it’ll show in six seconds, maybe it will be longer. Either way, six seconds is a lifetime for a visitor to wait until your site loads. And they will not wait, but instead just click away to another website.
We previously wrote an article Why People Leave Your Website. Speed is definitely high on that list of reasons why people leave. But in the case of Facebook, and especially if you’re boosting content expecting people to link to your website, you should ensure they will have a great user experience.
Maybe it’s time you find a new hosting provider. One that can handle websites built on content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. You should also make sure they have the expertise to properly manage their own servers so that applications necessary to run your website are kept up-to-date.
About the Author
Hazel Burgess is the Founder and Creative Director of Envisager Studio, a premier website design agency specializing in WordPress website design, development and content marketing promotion. The company is based in San Diego, CA and works with companies that range from small business to enterprise level. Follow +Hazel Burgess on Google+ as well as Twitter.
Leave a Reply