Do you want to add a click to upload GIF images to your WordPress site? Animated GIFs take longer to load, which affects page speed and user experience. This is why many popular blogging platforms don't automatically load GIFs into their apps. In this article, we are going to show you how you can easily add click to upload GIFs to WordPress.
Why add WP GIF Player to upload for GIFs in WordPress?
If you often add animated GIF images to WordPress, you already know that they are much larger than normal images. This means that they take longer to load, which affects the speed and performance of your Website .
Some sites deal with this with progressive loading images on WordPress. However, this still affects the user experience as GIF files take longer to load when the user scrolls down.
Popular platforms like Tumblr and others use WP GIF Player to load the GIF file and alleviate this problem. Instead of loading all the frames in a GIF animation, they only load the first frame of the animation. A play button on the image indicates that users can click to view the animated GIF.
That being said, let's take a look at how you can add this feature on WordPress.
How to integrate a GIF loading feature on WordPress
The first thing to do is to install and activate the plugin WP GIF Player. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on way to install a WordPress plugin.
This plugin works without configuration, and there are no settings for it.
You can head to the post edit screen to see it in action.
On the post editing screen, you will notice the Add GIF button above the post editor. Click on it to bring up the media download window where you can download your GIFs images similar to any other image.
Once downloaded, you must click the Insert Image button to continue.
The WP GIF Player plugin will now add the required shortcode in your WordPress post editor.
You can now save your post / page and click the preview button to see your click and load the GIFs in action.
All GIFs embedded in your post will now have a button above them. Clicking on the button will load the animated GIF in the background and display it.
A downside of this plugin is that it only works for new GIFs that download. It will only add this option on previously downloaded GIFs. This means that all of your previously downloaded GIFs will not have the click to load button.
We hope this article has helped you learn how to add the click to load GIFs on WordPress.
