How your slow website could be hurting your Facebook performance
Most marketers and business owners struggle to keep up with Facebook’s constantly evolving algorithms. It can be confusing to understand and get on top of, and if you lag behind for just a moment you can be left in the dark.
A quick look at some of the top queries on Google around algorithms gives you an insight into the mindset of Facebook users:
Social Media Examiner’s Paul Ramondo broke it down earlier this year when he discussed how a number of factors come into play when showing your original (unboosted) content to your audience.
We’ve put it into an infographic to help highlight the key factors that Paul mentions in his article.
Basically, Facebook creates a relevance score that connects each piece of content to each unique user. Facebook users are then only shown content which is unique to them. The higher the relevance score, the higher up the content goes on your feed.
For example, if a good friend shares an image of themselves with another good friend at a place nearby to you, it’s more likely to get shown in the top of your feed. Similarly, a news, brand or company page that you engage with often will be curated to the top of your newsfeed.
But now there’s another factor, and it’s weirdly not related to the actual content in the post: your website speed.
That’s right, no more hiding behind poor SEO and a slow website to boost your Facebook stats. Facebook have introduced a new algorithm which preferences stories that link to websites that load quicker.
“As many as 40 percent of website visitors abandon a site after three seconds of delay” – Facebook, 2017
They’ve identified what most SEO experts already know, slow websites lead to bounces and abandonment, as well as a poor user experience from the beginning.
Over the next few months they’ll be rolling this update out to improve user experience and ensure that companies who post content without having a good enough website to back it up will be penalised on Facebook.
But what does this mean for you? It means you need to make sure your site loads quickly and doesn’t have any SEO-related barriers keeping it from doing so.
There are a few different ways in which you can do this quickly, cheaply and easily.
Do it yourself
Yeah. We both know that’s not going to happen.
Hubspot’s Website Grader
Hubspot released a handy little tool 11 years ago called Website Grader.
It takes a few seconds to input your data and get a quick overview of how your website is performing:
This will show you briefly where your site is lacking from a Search Engine Optimisation perspective, and give your developer, SEO expert or (hopefully not) yourself tips on how to improve it.
SEO Insights Report from Emote Digital (that’s us)
Still not sure about what to fix and how to fix it? Our SEO Insights Report can give you a more in-depth look at what needs improving on your site, for the fraction of the cost of the bigger agencies.
It’s done by a human, not a robot or a computer, giving you insights and expert recommendations across the below areas:
- Site crawl-ability check
- Site speed optimisation suggestions
- XML sitemap inspection
- Google penalty recovery & precaution
- On-page optimisation suggestions
- Mobile-friendly optimisation methods
- Organic keywords research
- Backlink strategy
- Local SEO suggestions
If you’re interested in talking to Emote Digital about your website and how optimisation can benefit you, click here to start the process today.