• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 31, 2016

Facebook’s brand partners would obviously love more attention from Facebook’s users.

With that in mind, the social giant will now “prefetch” or pre-load brands' mobile sites before people actually click on them, in order to cut times and improve the user experience of viewing content in the Facebook in-app browser.

“One of the biggest issues in mobile advertising is mobile site performance,” a company spokeswoman said on Wednesday. “Many users get frustrated and quit before a mobile site even finishes loading.”

Indeed, up to 40% of visitors abandon sites if they have not fully loaded in three seconds, per the Aberdeen Group. In tests, pre-fetching shortened mobile site load time by as much as 29% -- or 8.5 seconds -- according to Facebook.

Over the coming months, Facebook will begin considering factors such as landing-page speeds when deciding what ads to show users.

As such, Facebook is encouraging brands and their technology partners to better optimize their mobile sites by minimizing landing page redirects, plug-ins and link shorteners; compressing files to decrease mobile rendering time; and improving server response times with multi-region hosting.

In recent years, Facebook has developed a number of solutions to help brands create mobile-optimized experiences, including Canvas, Pages and various in-app browsing capabilities.

Making sure brands are happy with their mobile efforts is critical to Facebook’s success now that mobile has become the social giant’s main source of revenue. 

Indeed, desktop ad revenue represented about 16% of Facebook’s overall ad revenue, last quarter -- down from 24%, year-over-year. And considering consumer’s love of all things mobile, that share only stands to dwindle.