Are you looking to improve the page load speed of your WordPress site? Increasing site speed will improve search engine rankings, and more importantly, improve user experience.
Content can make your site heavy and slow to load in browsers. Site content consists of comments, images, videos and scripts. Since these are usually large files, optimizing them will greatly affect your site’s speed.
What is lazy loading and how does it work?
Lazy loading means loading content only to the visible part of the browser. This delays the loading of content that appears at the bottom and invisible part of the browser.
Lazy loading will not load images and videos on your web page at the same time. The ones at the top of the web page will be loaded and displayed. Whereas those below the browser’s viewport will linger until the user scrolls down to that point on the page. As a result, images and videos will not download until the user needs it.
Importance of lazy loading
The main goal of lazy loading is to improve the speed of the website.
Site visitors can start using your site without waiting for all images and videos to be fully loaded. This saves visitors time and media download resources that they may not need in the long run.
Lazy loading also saves your site’s resources as you don’t have to submit images and videos until you need to.
Implementing Lazy Loading
There are several plugins for implementing lazy loading. I’ll show you how to enable lazy loading using one of the most popular and easy-to-use plugins for this purpose, A3 Lazy Load.
A3 Lazy Load
A3 Lazy Load is a free WordPress plugin for lazy loading images and videos. It’s easy to define elements to be lazy loaded through plugin settings. It supports copying and pasting video URLs into posts and pages.
This plugin is WooCommerce compatible .
From your WordPress admin panel, install and activate the plugin.
Once the installation is complete, go to Settings> A3 Lazy Load .
Then enable any items you want to enable lazy loading and save your changes.
Now load any page on your site. As you scroll quickly, you will see that the images and videos (as well as any other selected items) only start loading when you start scrolling through them.
And it’s all! Lazy loading enabled.
Other great plugins for enabling lazy loading
- Lazy Load Optimizer
Lazy Load Optimizer is a free WordPress lazy load image plugin. It supports lazy loading of content inserted from external sources into a web page. What’s more, it is WooCommerce compatible.
From your WordPress admin panel, install and activate the Lazy Load Optimizer plugin.
Then go to Settings> Lazy Load Optimizer
Include the content you want to process on the general settings page and save your changes.
- Crazy lazy
Crazy Lazy is a simple and easy to use WordPress lazy loading plugin.
It does all the basic functionality expected from a lazy loading plugin.
All you have to do is download, install and activate the plugin. And it’s ready to use.
- Lazy Load by WP Rocket
This plugin can lazily load images, videos and iframes and also replaces YouTube videos with thumbnails.
To use this plugin, you must download it from the plugins section of your WordPress admin panel.
Then go to Settings> Lazy Load in the dashboard.
Check all the elements you want to lazy load.
Save your changes.
- Lazy Load for Videos
Lazy loading for videos works on embedded Youtube and Vimeo videos. It helps to delay video loading when users click on the preview image. It also works with WordPress Multisite and other plugins.
Download the Lazy Load for Videos plugin from your WordPress admin panel.
Go to Settings> Lazy Load for Videos in your dashboard.
On the General / Style page, you can customize the settings for your site.
Be sure to check “responsive mode” to improve responsiveness across all devices.
Then save your changes.
This plugin supports other customizations such as:
- Disable lazy loading for Youtube and Vimeo videos.
- Displaying video titles on Youtube and Vimeo.
- Adding custom CSS.
- WP YouTube Lyte
WP YouTube Lyte allows you to add lazy loaded Youtube videos. If you only want to lazily download videos from Youtube, this is a great solution for you. This plugin works on all devices.
To use WP YouTube Lyte, you need to download, install and activate it on your site.
Click on Settings> WP YouTube Lyte in your dashboard.
Review all of the settings on the Basic Settings page and mark them accordingly.
Be sure to enter your YouTube API Key . This allows the plugin to function optimally.
Then click on the “Save Changes” button.
Conclusion
WordPress lazy loading is one of the great methods to optimize your website speed. By controlling the loading of images and other media, you can dramatically increase your site’s speed and improve resource utilization.
