Deleting the Facebook app could save as much as 15 per cent of your iPhone's battery life, an experiment by the Guardian has shown.

The paper's technology writer, Samuel Gibbs, who used an iPhone 6S Plus for a week without the app installed, switched to accessing the social networking site on the web browser Safari instead.

Mr Gibbs followed a strict routine during his experiment - he recorded the battery life at 10.30pm each day and compared it to a daily average taken from a week of using the app, and charged the phone overnight.

He also accessed Facebook via Safari as per normal, and did not uninstall the Facebook messenger app.

"On average I had 15 per cent more battery left by 10.30pm each day," Mr Gibbs wrote.

"I had also saved space, because at the point I had deleted the Facebook app it had consumed around 500MB in total combining the 111MB of the app itself and its cache on the iPhone."

To strengthen his case, he got several other Facebook-using iPhone owners to conduct the same week-long test, with the same results.

Mr Gibbs said his experience of using Facebook on Safari was "almost as good" as the app. However, the share-to function and features like Instant Articles are not available on the browser.

He also warned that results might vary for the smaller iPhone 6S, which has a smaller battery.

Having earlier conducted a similar test on an Android phone, Mr Gibbs found that the absence of the Facebook app extended battery life by up to 20 per cent.