As a WordPress website owner or administrator, you may have put a lot of effort into keeping your website running as best as possible. No one is forcing you to do this except your competitors, and it just implies that we should always look for ways to improve the performance of our website. That’s the case – if you’re not in a hurry, you’re falling behind. Just don’t stop.
Optimizing images for the web is an essential part of optimizing websites for peak performance. Images can cause various problems on a website. One of the ways to fix these is what we call WordPress lazy load.
Still not sure what lazy loading is? Do not worry. In this article we will show you:
Technically, lazy loading is delaying the instantiation of an object on your web page until it’s necessary. In a more practical sense and when applied to pictures, lazy loading is when your images are loaded when they are too close to being viewed.
The opposite of lazy loading is eager loading. In this philosophy, as many items as possible should be loaded simultaneously. This way you may have to wait a little longer while the page loads, but you can make sure the whole page loads when it does.
When you visit a WordPress website with lazy loading enabled, images are loaded as you scroll down to see them. With an eager upload website these images will always be there. To wait.
Lazy loading is a useful strategy that finds its way into many websites. The simple answer to being useful and accessible is that it speeds up the loading time of web pages and posts.. At a time when a fraction of a second seems like a worthy goal to spend weeks on website optimization, lazy loading pays off.
Lazy loading is not without its detectors. Some might say this hurts SEO. Others can cause lag in image display and ultimately hurt the user experience. An ad below the fold can even hurt website revenue as it won’t load until you scroll down, giving you fewer impressions.. The problem has become even more pronounced on mobile devices.
However, if you’ve weighed the good against the bad and come to the conclusion that lazy loading is worth it for your WordPress website, you can also find the easiest way to add lazy loading to an image on your website.
Are you ready for it? Here it goes: Update your WordPress core to any updates since (and inclusive) update 5.5. Before this update, you had to install a plugin that allowed you to load images very lazy. It’s now a regular feature and part of WordPress code. WordPress just saved you from installing another plugin.
If you don’t want to update to 5.5 though, that will be in store for you. In this case, downloading and using one of the plugins that did not drop the lazy loading support after the WordPress announcement would be the right choice.. For example, you will also find that many plugins you will use to compress images offer lazy loading as a feature.
If you are already using a plugin that is adding lazy load to WordPress when the update is released and you are now afraid that updating to 5.5 might cause redundancies and conflicts, you have a few options. The first and most obvious is to check if the plugin you are using is now compatible with WordPress 5.5.. You will find that there are many of them.
But if not, you can decide to go without a plugin or switch to a plugin like below. a3 Lazy Load. This plugin works with WordPress to enable lazy loading not only of images from the media library, but also of images loaded from outside the library. The good folks at a3 Lazy Load took the proactive approach and made their plugin compatible with WordPress’ newly added lazy loading feature.
Finally, you can download and install it. Disable Lazy Loading plugin. Enabling it disables WordPress’ newly added lazy loading features, leaving everything to the plugins you already have.
Let’s wrap it up!
Lazy loading is a useful feature that reduces the time it takes to load your website’s pages and posts. Although we had to enable it using plugins in the past, it has become a core feature of WordPress since the 5.5 update.
But that doesn’t mean you have to uninstall the image optimization plugin you’re using – most of them are now 5.5 compatible and work great with WordPress’ features. However, if all else fails, you can always disable lazy loading in WordPress and rely on the functionality of a plugin instead.
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