The loading speed of your site pages is one of the most important things that website owners pay attention to, so that the site is friendly to the search engine and also friendly to users, and here we are talking about images that have a significant impact on the governance of the page as well as the loading time.
In this article, we will talk about the lazy load feature, which contributes in one way or another to improving the speed of your website pages, especially those that contain a large number of images, by delaying the loading of images until the user reaches them. We will learn about this feature and how to benefit from it on your WordPress site.
What is lazy loading?
The size of the image or videos is one of the main factors that affects the loading time of a web page, along with the content and server response. The larger the image or video, the longer it will take to load. They should be of a suitable size for your website so that you do not suffer from this problem.
Lazy loading is a method you can use to improve your website’s performance by gradually loading images or videos in the background based on users’ interaction with the page. For example, not all images or videos on the page are loaded at once. Rather, when the visitor scrolls down the page, they will load at the same time.
This way, the page will load quickly while the rest of the images or videos load when the visitor scrolls to them. The purpose of this technology is to improve site page loading times by saving images or videos so that they can be displayed based on visitor behavior. This means that you only upload the photos or videos you need, and then display them as needed.
The importance of lazy loading?
1- Improve page loading time
The most common reason for slow loading times is using too many images or videos. The more of them you have, the longer it will take for your pages to load, because it requires them all to load at the same time in one go. Using lazy loading, all components of the page will be loaded individually depending on the visitor’s interaction with the content on the page, and this will reduce the page loading time.
2- Improving the user experience
Improving site speed is one of the most important factors that leads to improved user experience. If the page takes too long to load, users will abandon you and go elsewhere. Lazy loading technology will load user-visible content gradually based on their interaction, rather than loading it all at once.
3- Search engine optimization
Site speed is important in SEO and reducing bounce rate as visitors prefer sites that operate faster. The longer your website takes to load, the higher your bounce rate. Lazy loading technology makes the site load faster, which leads to a significant improvement in search engine results.
4- Increase income
Using lazy loading will often increase your earnings over time if you rely on displaying ads as a source of income. Ads load faster, which means a visitor is likely to spend more time on your site, resulting in higher click-through rates (CTR).
5- Cost saving
There are a number of companies that provide hosting, cloud storage, networking, etc., and they base the cost on the number of data transferred. Therefore, when you use the lazy loading technique, all visual content will not be displayed at once, but rather according to the visitor’s interaction with the content.
For example: There is a certain category of visitors who are only interested in the first part of the content, and then they leave the site, so not using the lazy loading technique leads to displaying all the already visible content without benefit, which adds an additional cost to you.
Read also: The most important procedures to increase the speed of your WordPress site Comprehensive guide
The best lazy loading plugins for WordPress
1- Lazy Load by WP Rocket
Lazy Load by WP Rocket is a great plugin that helps load images one by one depending on the visitor’s interaction with the content. The plugin automatically detects content that is not essential to the user experience, such as thumbnails, and will not display them until the visitor scrolls to them. This significantly reduces page loading time.
Read also: An explanation of the Wp Rocket plugin to speed up WordPress sites
2- Smush
Smush helps you get the most out of your photos by compressing the size of images without sacrificing quality. If you are using high-resolution images on your site pages and it causes the pages to load slowly, you can keep your website optimized by using a plugin.
Read also: How to compress the size of your website images without losing quality | 3 different ways
3- Optimole
Optimole is a plugin that automatically optimizes the images you add to your site pages. It significantly reduces the size of images without making any change in quality, and significantly improves the performance of your site.
4- A3 Lazy load
A3 Lazy Load is the most popular in WordPress because it is easier to use and has a number of features that make your website faster. It works by loading images only when a visitor scrolls to them, not before. This significantly reduces the time it takes for images to load on your site. Through this add-on you can also specify the loading time, and add Fade In and Spinner effects when loading images.
5- Lazy Loader
Lazy Loader not only enables lazy loading of images, but also supports iframes, videos, and audio files. This plugin is the most widely used because it includes many free add-ons.
6- Speed Up – Lazy Load
The Speed Up-Lazy Load plugin boosts your site’s speed by enabling lazy loading of images and iframes. This plugin also allows you to disable lazy loading on specific pages or areas.
7- Lazy Load for Videos
If your website contains a lot of videos and is running slow, the Lazy Load for Videos plugin will solve that problem because it is designed to enable lazy loading for videos.
It works by replacing Vimeo and YouTube videos with previewable images. Videos will only load if the visitor clicks on the image. This allows you to improve the speed of the site by not showing unnecessary videos to the visitor.
In the end, as you followed us on our journey during this article in which we talked about what lazy loading is, its importance, and how it works, we also learned about the best lazy loading plugins for WordPress.
Although the latest versions of WordPress already include lazy loading for images, videos, etc., there are times when you may need more control over how it works on your site in a way that suits your business.
