Easy ways for lazy loading your images in WordPress.
In the ever-changing digital landscape, the load speed of a website can greatly influence user engagement and overall satisfaction. This is particularly true for content-rich platforms like WordPress, which often host a multitude of images and media files. One effective technique to enhance site performance and user experience is through the use of lazy loading. This method involves deferring the loading of non-critical resources at page load time and instead loading these elements as they are needed, typically as the user scrolls through the page.
Before we get down to talking about implementing lazy loading on your images, let’s understand what lazy loading is and why it is important for your website and user experience. We will also talk about the correct way to implement it so you can get the most out of it.
Understanding Lazy loading
The term “lazy loading” defines itself. It means to load lazily or when the user scrolls to the exact resource where the lazy load is implemented. Lazy loading serves as a strategic solution to improve a website’s speed and efficiency.
The principle behind it is very simple. Instead of loading all the resources at once, which significantly increases the website’s load time speed and consumes more bandwidth, it loads the necessary resources.
This strategy not only improves the load time of the page but also contributes positively to one of the most essential core web vitals of Google, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Optimization of LCP is crucial for your site’s speed and user’s experiences.
Implementing lazy loading can significantly reduce data usage and save bandwidth, especially vital for mobile users with limited internet speed or data plans; moreover, it’s beneficial for SEO when executed correctly, ensuring that content is both user- and search engine-friendly. This article explores how you can leverage lazy loading on your WordPress site to lazy load images and other content, ultimately enhancing your site’s performance and visitor engagement.
How does lazy loading work?
- Initial Page Load: When the user first accesses your webpage, only the essential elements are loaded. The images or any other resources that are not present in the viewport are not immediately downloaded.
- Interactions with users: As the user browses through the webpage, the browser dynamically loads the additional resources.
- Resource Management: Lazy loading efficiently manages the resources of the webpage, loading them only when needed. This reduces unnecessary network and resource consumption on the user’s side. This is particularly beneficial for users with limited bandwidth or device capabilities.
Benefits and Considerations
Lazy loading is particularly effective when it comes to the image or any other resource-heavy sites like news portals, blogging and others. These types of websites greatly rely on images, videos and similar types of contents. These heavy resources are often the reason for slow web page performance. And with the help of lazy loads, these WordPress or any other websites can perform pretty well and meet the expectations of their users.
However, if not implemented properly, lazy loads can also lead to various issues on site. The leading issue can be search indexing, which can also affect the user’s experience negatively by delaying the loading of visible contents.
Therefore, it’s crucial to use lazy loading judiciously and test its impact on both performance and user engagement.
Lazy Loading in WordPress
Within WordPress, there are 3 major methods that you can use to implement lazy loading on your website.
- Using and updating the WordPress version to its latest upgrades
- Utilizing lazy load attribute in the image tag
- best plugins for easier lazy loadings
Using and updating the WordPress version to its latest upgrades
With the release of WordPress 5.5, websites now have lazy loading enabled by default. Meaning the resources uploaded to your WordPress website will automatically lazy loaded according to the user’s viewpoint.
So, if you are using the older version of WordPress, specifically older than 5.4, then make sure to upgrade to its latest version to utilize lazy loading features.
To check your WordPress version:
- Go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Update.
- If you’re using the old versions of WordPress, you’ll get a prompt to upgrade to a newer version of the CMS.
Using lazy load attribute in the image tag
Another easy way to lazy load your images is to add load="lazy" attribute to the img tag. This attribute allows you to specify the image you’d like to load when it appears from the user’s viewpoint.
The attribute is supported by most modern browsers.
You can add a lazy attribute like this:
<img src="image.jpg" alt="example" loading="lazy">
Additionally, JavaScript can be utilized to lazy load images. There are several libraries designed for this purpose, including Lozad.js, among others, that facilitate the lazy loading of images on your WordPress site.
Using plugins for easier lazy loadings
WordPress is one of the best platforms to use for your business because of its extensibility with plugins. Plugins can help you add many functionalities to your website. They will help you increase your user’s experiences and search engine rankings.
There are various plugins that you can easily find in WordPress for lazy loading. But we have chosen the three bests among them all for you. Let’s look at them.
Note: Follow the links in the headings of each section of the plugin for their official instructions.
With WP Rocket
WP Rocket is another caching plugin for WordPress that works for almost all user groups, such as bloggers, eCommerce sites, freelancers, and agencies. You can additionally defer image and video loading using its lazy load feature.
Enabling lazy loading with WP Rocket
Activating: Navigate to the WP Rocket settings panel in your WordPress dashboard. Here, you can easily toggle the lazy load for images and videos on or off. This feature overrides WordPress’s native lazy loading to prevent conflicts.
Extending: Besides standard images and videos, WP Rocket allows lazy loading for iframes and even background images that are added inline within your HTML. This ensures a broader performance improvement across your site.
Advanced Lazy Loading Features
SEO-Friendly: WP Rocket’s lazy load adheres to Google’s page speed recommendations. They do it by deferring offscreen images, which helps improve your site’s load time and SEO.
Comprehensive Coverage: All images within tags across your content—posts, widgets, and more—are automatically lazy loaded. However, images loaded from JavaScript are not covered by this feature.
Special Cases: For background images defined in CSS files, WP Rocket introduced a feature from version 3.15 that supports lazy loading for CSS background images. This is particularly useful if the background image is added to a CSS file or internal CSS style tag.
By implementing WP Rocket’s Lazy Load feature, you can significantly enhance your WordPress site’s performance, ensuring content is loaded efficiently and only as needed. This not only improves the user experience but also contributes positively to your site’s SEO efforts.
With Optimole Plugin
Optimole is an all-in-one image optimization solution that includes lazy loading, serving images via CDN (Cloud Delivery Network) and also converting images into next-gen formats like WebP and AVIF.
Using Optimole for lazy loading
Installing and Activating: Download and install the Optimole plugin from the WordPress plugin repository or download it via their official website. Once installed, activate the plugin through your WordPress dashboard.
Enabling the feature: Navigate to the settings tab of Optimole via the WordPress dashboard. Then open the Advanced option and go to the Lazy Load option. Use the toggle to enable Lazy Load with Generic Placeholder.
Special features
Configure Settings: You can adjust your settings to specify how your images are handled, including the use of generic placeholders and adding lazy loading animation.
Cloud Based Optimizations: This plugin replaces your images URLs with cloud-based URLs and optimizes images on the fly as they are requested by visitors.
By following these steps, you can enhance your WordPress site’s performance with Optimole’s comprehensive image optimization and lazy loading capabilities.
With Perfmatters
Lazy loading images in WordPress using the Perfmatters plugin can significantly improve your website’s peformance.
For lazy loading with Perfmatters
lnstall and access Perfmatters settings: Install the Perfmatters plugin from WordPress’s plugin repository. Then access the settings of the plugin via WordPress dashboard.
Enabling Lazy loading: In the settings, you’ll easily find the options to lazy load your images, iframes, and videos. Enable the features as per your need.
Advances features
Configure Exclusions: Under “Exclude Leading Images”, you can choose how many images you want to choose from lazy loading, starting from the top of the page.
Make sure to save your changes and configurations.
Additional Optimization Tips
Lazy loading is just one of the aspects of optimizing your site and making it rocket fast. Here are some of the crucial steps to further enhance your website’s performance:
Minimizing load resources
- Compress and Optimize Files: Employ tools such as GZIP to eliminate superfluous characters from your files, considerably diminishing their size and enhancing loading speeds.
- Optimize Images and Videos: Select suitable formats and compress your media files. For images, resizing, cropping, and choosing the correct format can reduce file size while maintaining quality.
- Use Caching and Content Delivery Networks: Implement browser caching and consider utilizing CDN services to reduce load times by distributing copies of your files across multiple, geographically dispersed data centers.
Eliminating render blocking resources
- Inline Critical CSS and JavaScript: Inlining essential styles and scripts can minimize render-blocking resources, leading to quicker page rendering.
- Optimize Fonts and Icons: Make sure that fonts and icons are optimized so they do not hinder the rendering of your page.
Regularly monitoring performance
- Measure and Monitor: Regularly monitor your website’s performance to identify areas for enhancement, guaranteeing fast loading times and a smooth user experience.
Integrating these strategies can significantly enhance the efficiency and speed of your WordPress site, making it more attractive to both users and search engines.
In Conclusion
Lazy loading is a powerful tool in the arsenal of web performance optimization techniques. For us WordPress users, plugins like WP Rocket, Optimole and Perfmatters simplify the adoption of lazy loading, making it accessible to a wide range of users with varying levels of technical expertise.
By understanding and implementing lazy loading, website owners and developers can significantly enhance the performance and usability of their sites. Such actions help in providing a seamless experience for their visitors while reaping the benefits of improved SEO and reduced bandwidth costs.
In an era where speed and efficiency are paramount, embracing lazy loading is not just an option—it’s an essential component of a successful digital strategy.
For further reading, check out the wonderful guide about hiring WordPress developers perfect for your website from Toptal.
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