Over the past few years, Instagram has added a lot of features to its roster in an attempt to remain competitive in the social media platform marketplace. With up and comers like Snapchat soaring in their popularity with the coveted younger demographics, Instagram, as well as its parent company Facebook, scrambled to add enticing features, with Stories and direct messaging being two of the biggest features that ended up being added to this social network over the past few years.
However, while these added features did contribute to an improved experience with Instagram, the fact of the matter is that it had an unintended side effect as well: increased loading times for the web app. This seems understandable when you realize that the payload that is arriving via your internet connection whenever you open the Instagram website is considerably larger than it used to be.
If there is one thing that can spell the death of any entity that is trying to remain relevant on the internet, it is excessive loading times. Most users would not bother with a site that takes too long to load, so it was pretty clear that Instagram needed to do something about this fast if it wanted to try and stay competitive in the long run.
Hence, the image sharing and messaging platform made a few changes that it discussed which were meant to improve loading times and help the web app load at faster speeds. These changes include techniques such as load optimization as well as pre-fetching, both of which enabled it to continue offering the heavy duty features that have made it such an important part of the social media marketplace whilst simultaneously offering loading times that are at the very least competitive with other sites, and could potentially supersede the efficacy of other sites in this particular area all in all.
These changes have actually made a difference in how fast the web app is loading. The time it takes for photos to load is now 25% faster, a significant improvement indeed. One problem that a lot of users were facing was that when they scrolled to the bottom of a particular page, they had to wait far too long for the next page of images to load. This has also been handled by Instagram with the platform improving these loading times by 56%.
With Facebook losing its credibility due to its various scandals over the past few years along with the hefty fine placed upon it by the FTC, the social media giant will start to look to Instagram to pull its own weight and remain competitive so that the conglomerate can keep up with the rapid changes that are currently occurring in the social media marketplace, and improving loading times is just one of the many ways in which they would attempt to do that.
Read next: Instagram is Reportedly Working on a New Explore Design!
However, while these added features did contribute to an improved experience with Instagram, the fact of the matter is that it had an unintended side effect as well: increased loading times for the web app. This seems understandable when you realize that the payload that is arriving via your internet connection whenever you open the Instagram website is considerably larger than it used to be.
If there is one thing that can spell the death of any entity that is trying to remain relevant on the internet, it is excessive loading times. Most users would not bother with a site that takes too long to load, so it was pretty clear that Instagram needed to do something about this fast if it wanted to try and stay competitive in the long run.
Hence, the image sharing and messaging platform made a few changes that it discussed which were meant to improve loading times and help the web app load at faster speeds. These changes include techniques such as load optimization as well as pre-fetching, both of which enabled it to continue offering the heavy duty features that have made it such an important part of the social media marketplace whilst simultaneously offering loading times that are at the very least competitive with other sites, and could potentially supersede the efficacy of other sites in this particular area all in all.
These changes have actually made a difference in how fast the web app is loading. The time it takes for photos to load is now 25% faster, a significant improvement indeed. One problem that a lot of users were facing was that when they scrolled to the bottom of a particular page, they had to wait far too long for the next page of images to load. This has also been handled by Instagram with the platform improving these loading times by 56%.
With Facebook losing its credibility due to its various scandals over the past few years along with the hefty fine placed upon it by the FTC, the social media giant will start to look to Instagram to pull its own weight and remain competitive so that the conglomerate can keep up with the rapid changes that are currently occurring in the social media marketplace, and improving loading times is just one of the many ways in which they would attempt to do that.
Read next: Instagram is Reportedly Working on a New Explore Design!
