Would you like to learn how to implement lazy loading in WordPress?

If your WordPress website relies heavily on visual content, you may need to add Lazy Loading functionality to it. This WordPress feature helps improve a website's page speed and performance, making it essential for your SEO efforts.

This article will explore how Lazy Loading works as well as its pros and cons. You will also learn how to implement it on your website and ways to optimize its use for best results.

Without further ado, we invite you to consult our list of WordPress themes. But before, if you have never installed WordPress discover How to Install a WordPress Blog in 7 Steps et How to search, install and activate a WordPress theme on your blog 

Then back to why we are here.

What is Lazy Loading?

It is a feature that allows a website to only load images visible to the user. It helps the website maintain fast loading speed by not uploading images outside the viewport.

How Does WordPress Lazy Loading Work?

When a user visits a WordPress website, their browser downloads all the images on the webpage at once. For pages with many high-resolution images, this process can significantly reduce loading time, which can hurt your website's performance.

Adding a Lazy Loading to your website prompts it to only download images visible on the user's screen. The rest of the media files are replaced with a placeholder image and only loaded when the user scrolls down the webpage.

Advantages and Disadvantages of WordPress Lazy Loading

If you are still wondering if you should implement lazy image loading in WordPress, here are the pros and cons of the feature:

Advantages:

  • Reduces bandwidth usage, reducing hosting costs.
  • Improves the speed of the website thereby improving the browsing experience of visitors.
  • Improves the mobile experience.
  • Improves effort SEO, increasing the ranking of your website on search engines.

Against:

  • Causes content buffering, which affects loading speed.
  • Slows down fast scrolling.

How to Add Lazy Loading to Your WordPress Website: 3 Methods

There are three ways to implement lazy loading on your WordPress website. We recommend that you choose the method that best suits your situation.

1. Upgrade to WordPress 5.4 or higher

WordPress 5.4 and later supports lazy loading by default. Updating your WordPress to the latest version will automatically support lazy loading.

Although this is the easiest method, it does not allow you to configure which images to load lazily. Therefore, your website may abuse the feature, manifesting the aforementioned disadvantages.

Another factor to consider is the different nature of the Lazy Loading feature in each version of WordPress. Recently, WordPress released a new version of WordPress that implements improvements to address issues with poor broad content scores from older versions.

This means that websites running on older versions of WordPress do not get the same benefits as those running WordPress 5.9 which is the latest version.

2. Enable native lazy loading through the browser

Popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Opera support lazy loading. You just need to add the attribute to targeted images and videos to activate it automatically.

In native WordPress lazy loading, the loading attribute supports these three values:

  • Cars : Triggers lazy loading by default, which is equivalent to not including a loading attribute.
  • Lazy : Distributes the loading of resources until each reaches the specified distance from the viewport.
  • Eager : Loads all resources as soon as the page loads, regardless of their location.

Here is an example of use:

<img src=”nom-image.png” loading=”lazy” alt=”alt attribute” width=”800″ height=”411″>

This method is great for lazily loading certain images, giving each a loading attribute that dictates when they appear in the viewport. However, lazy loading individual images can take a while, especially if your website contains a lot of media files.

3. Install a WordPress Plugin

Since not all browsers support lazy loading for images and videos, the second method may not work all the time. You can mitigate this problem by installing a Lazy loading WordPress plugin. This method gives you more control over which images to load lazily without coding.

Here are best WordPress plugins of lazy loading to choose from, accessible via the directory of WordPress plugins.

Improve your Website Loading Speed

One of the good things about this WordPress plugin is that it supports all image types including AVIF. This freemium lazy loading WordPress plugin provides optimization and updating. the scale of the image to adapt them to visitors' devices, ensuring a user experience optimal.

implement lazy loading

When it detects a slower network, this WordPress plugin gives you the option to degrade the image quality. Moreover, you can save storage space by storing images in the cloud library of this WordPress plugin.

This free plugin lets you optimize images for up to 5 monthly visits. Purchasing the Pro plan will allow you to lazy load images for 000 monthly active visitors and more. Images for both plans are served through the AWS Cloudfront CDN.

Download | Demo | Web hosting

smush

Smush is a popular image optimization plugin that supports lazy loading. It is compatible with WordPress themes popular, page builders and media library plugins. Moreover, it allows you to save plugin settings in unlimited configurations and apply them with just a few clicks.

implement lazy loading

Other useful features are incorrect image size detection, support for multisite and image compression tools. Upgrading to Smush Pro lets you optimize large images without size limitations, save original images, and access other WPMU Pro plugins. Prices start from 5 $ / month.

Download | Demo | Web hosting

a3 LazyLoad

a3 Lazy Load is a free mobile-oriented lazy loading plugin. It is fully compatible with WordPress 5.9 and a number of popular tools including WebP and AMP plugins.

implement lazy loading

Besides offering basic lazy loading functionality, a3 Lazy Load also lets you lazy load videos, including videos embedded in pages, posts, custom post types, and widgets. Lazy loading effects and the ability to load scripts from the header or footer are also available.

Other notable features like multisite support, WebP image support, and lazy iframe loading – this applies to iframes that WordPress core does not load, such as Google Maps and embedded media.

Download | Demo | Web hosting

WordPress Lazy Loading Tips

The key to getting the most out of lazy loading is using it correctly. Here are some tips for setting up lazy loading on your WordPress website:

  • Don't lazy load header images. Since images placed at the top of the page are visible when loading, their lazy loading has no benefit.
  • Choose the appropriate placeholders. We recommend using a solid color cast or low quality image as a placeholder for your images.
  • Add buffer time for image loading. This way, your images are ready just before entering the visitor viewport, eliminating any waiting time.
  • Define the dimensions of the image containers. This will help you avoid sudden layout changes, which will make your web page look tidy when loading.
  • Implement lazy loading on long pages only. Long pages include those that take more than two spins to reach the end and have more than five images.

Lazy loading in WordPress allows you to give visitors a better browsing experience. In addition to improving website speed, this feature also reduces your bandwidth usage. All in all, it helps your SEO efforts for better rankings in search engine results.

Other recommended resources

We also invite you to consult the resources below to go further in the grip and control of your website and blog.

Conclusion

That's it for this tutorial that shows you how to implement Lazy Loading on your WordPress website. We hope this article helped you understand how to get the most out of the lazy loading feature on WordPress websites. Be sure to use a WordPress hosting high quality to further improve the performance of your website.

If you have any concerns or suggestions, please let us know within Comments.

However, you will also be able to consult our resources, if you need more elements to carry out your projects of creation of Internet sites, by consulting our guide on the WordPress blog creation or the one on Divi: the best WordPress theme of all time.

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