There are a few different factors which could affect how quickly your Facebook feed loads. In version 6.0 of the plugin we’ve made the plugin faster and added some significant features to help optimize the performance of your feed.
Here are some tips for how to improve the load time of your Facebook feed:
1) Reduce number of posts you request from Facebook
If you request 100 posts from Facebook then it will take longer to load than if you request 10. Try reducing the number of posts you are requesting and loading posts in smaller batches. In version 6.0+ of the plugin you can enable a “Load More” button which will allow you to load smaller batches of posts and may drastically increase performance.
2) Reduce the “Post Limit” setting, or set it to “Auto”
The “Post Limit” setting controls the exact number of posts that the plugin retrieves from Facebook. By default, the plugin will set this automatically because some posts are filtered out as they aren’t desirable to display in your feed, and so the plugin retrieves some extra posts as a buffer. Â If you have this number set a lot higher than the number of posts you are trying to display then it will cause an increase in load time as you are requesting a lot more posts than needed. Try decreasing the number to be the same or slightly above the number of posts you are trying to display, or just change it to be “Auto” (v3.0+ only) and let the plugin decide how many posts to retrieve.
Important: If you’re using the Multifeed extension then this setting controls how many posts you retrieve for each page so you would need to set it to “Manual” and enter a number. See the section at the bottom of this page for more information.
3) Increase caching time
The plugin checks Facebook for new posts based on the time you have set on the plugin’s Settings page. This initial retrieval can cause the first page load to be slower than usual as the plugin is querying the Facebook API. Once the plugin retrieves those posts then it caches them in your WordPress database for the time specified, and so all future page loads will be much quicker until the cache expires and the plugin checks for new posts again. The longer this caching time is, the less often the plugin will need to check Facebook few data and so the less frequent these longer page loads will be.
4) Enable background caching
In version 3.0 and above we’ve introduced a setting that allows you to check for new Facebook posts in the background so that the check isn’t performed on a page load. Enabling this setting means that when the page loads then posts should always be pulled from the cache and rarely from Facebook which will help to improve performance.
Multifeed Extension
In relation to the Multifeed extension; the ‘Post Limit’ is the number of posts retrieved from each page and the ‘Number of Posts’ is the total number of posts to show in that feed. So for example, if you’re displaying posts from 5 Facebook pages, and you set the API Post limit to 3 the plugin would retrieve 3 posts from each page (15 in total).
There’s more information in the ‘How to Use’ tab of the Multifeed Extension page.
