Social Media Feeds Embedded on the Home Page

Three feeds at the bottom of the page

Scroll to the bottom of many small business home pages and you find them stacked: a Twitter timeline, a Facebook page box and a grid of Instagram photos.

They were added for a sensible reason. The business posts on social media far more often than anyone updates the website, and a live feed seemed a free way to keep the home page fresh.

What the feeds actually bring to the page is less obvious, because it all happens in the visitor's browser, out of sight.

What a feed loads on every visit

An embedded feed is not a picture of your posts. It is a small program supplied by the platform, which the visitor's browser has to download and run before any posts appear.

• A script from the platform's servers, downloaded and run first.
• Images often far larger than the space they fill.
• Extra requests to servers you do not control.
• Cookies the platform can set or read.
• Posts you did not pick, such as shares and replies.
• An empty box when the platform changes its rules.

The last is the one owners discover by accident. Platforms change what outside sites may pull from them, and feed plugins can stop working overnight, leaving a blank space or an error message on the busiest page of the site.

The cost on a phone

On office broadband the extra weight is easy to miss. On a phone with a weak signal, every additional script and image adds to the wait.

Three feeds can mean three separate scripts, many extra requests and a stack of large images, all competing with the content the visitor came for.

Scripts that load early can hold up the rest of the page. Feeds that arrive late make the page jump as they fill in, often just as somebody starts reading.

Google has said that from July, page speed will count in mobile search rankings, though only for the slowest pages. A home page carrying three feeds is worth checking.

Old posts on the front page

A feed shows whatever the account last posted, and accounts go quiet.

A Twitter timeline whose latest entry is from last spring tells visitors that nobody is minding the business online, and some will wonder whether it is still open.

The feed also shows whatever the platform serves up: a share of somebody else's post, a reply out of context, a holiday photo meant for followers rather than first-time customers.

The home page is the one place on a site where nothing should be left to chance, and a live feed is chance by design.

A worked example

A craft brewery with a tasting room had all three feeds on its home page, below a large photograph and above the opening hours.

The Instagram plugin pulled twenty full-size photos and shrank them in the browser. The Twitter account had been quiet for over a year, so the timeline led with a post about a beer the brewery no longer made.

On a phone, the hours and address that people wanted appeared only after everything else had loaded, and the page jumped twice while they tried to read it.

The Twitter timeline went, and the Facebook box became a plain link. The Instagram grid was replaced by six recent photos that the server fetches once a day, resizes and stores.

Visitors now receive small, ordinary images from the site itself. The hours and what is on tap moved to the top of the page, as text.

Lighter ways to show you are active

Most of what a feed is meant to say, that the business is busy and current, can be said without loading anyone's script.

A short latest news block, updated by hand when something happens, does it in three lines. A handful of recent photos, fetched and resized by the server, gives the look of a feed without the weight.

Plain icons linking to each profile cost almost nothing. And where one post matters, such as an event announcement, embedding that single post on the relevant page is far lighter than a whole timeline.

The lighter options also keep your visitors' browsing between you and them. An embedded feed tells the platform that someone opened your page, which is worth weighing as privacy rules tighten this month.

If a feed stays

Some businesses will keep one, and there are ways to make it cheaper.

Keep it to one platform, the one you actually post on, and limit it to a few posts. Place it well below the main content, with its height set in advance so the page does not jump.

Load it only after the rest of the page, or when the visitor scrolls near it. Then check it once a month, since a feed that breaks rarely announces it.

Testing with and without

The cost of a feed is easy to measure, and worth measuring before anyone argues about it.

Run the home page through a speed test such as WebPageTest, set to a phone on a mobile connection. Note the page weight, the number of requests and how long until the page is usable.

Then test a copy of the page without the feeds. The difference between the two runs is the price they charge every visitor.

Try it on a real phone too, on cellular data instead of the office network, and note how long it takes before the hours and the phone number can be read.

The counter-case

For some businesses, the social account genuinely is the most current information they have.

A food truck posting today's location, a venue announcing tonight's line-up, a fishing charter reporting this morning's conditions: for them, the latest post is what visitors came for.

Even then, the useful part is usually the newest post rather than a scrolling timeline, and it can often be shown as text and one image. Show recent activity without making every visitor download a platform to see it.

The check

1. Count the feeds on your home page.
2. Check the date of each newest post.
3. Test the page with and without them.
4. Remove any feed from an account gone quiet.
5. Replace the rest with a light, static block.
6. Link to your profiles with plain icons.
7. Check any feed you keep once a month.

Step four is the quickest decision on the list. A feed from an account nobody posts to costs speed and credibility at the same time, and removing it costs nothing.

Another heavy element that home pages carry mainly for show is covered in autoplay video with sound stops working in Chrome.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.