{"id":2647879,"date":"2024-05-31T10:41:11","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T08:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/?p=2647879"},"modified":"2024-06-18T14:55:28","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T12:55:28","slug":"lazy-loading-wordpress-5-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/blog\/lazy-loading-wordpress-5-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Lazy Loading in WordPress: Lazy Load Images, Videos, and More"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does your WordPress website use a lot of images? It wouldn\u2019t be a surprise, since they are the most popular media format<\/a> on the web. However, at the same time, images can seriously slow down your site, which is why you need to know how to use lazy loading in WordPress.<\/p>

We have talked about optimizing images<\/a> before, to make them as small as possible so they load quickly. However, there is a limit to how much you can shrink your image size without compromising quality. In addition, if you have lots of images on the same page, their size adds up, even if they have been optimized.<\/p>

Lazy loading addresses this by preventing visuals that are not visible initially from being loaded. This helps reduce the Critical Rendering Path<\/a> and also improves Largest Contentful Paint<\/a>. In short, it positively impacts page loading time without compromising user experience.<\/p>

Reason enough to put together a detailed guide on lazy loading in WordPress, don\u2019t you agree? That\u2019s why, in the following article, you\u2019ll learn how it works and how you can apply lazy loading to your site for the best results.<\/p>

What Is Lazy Loading?<\/h2>

Usually, when you open a web page, your browser loads all its data at once. Every image, text, link, etc. on it.<\/p>

Especially with images, if there are a lot of them, this can take a long time. Images are much larger than other website elements. In addition, while the browser is busy with them, they often block other assets from loading, preventing your page from finishing the rendering process.<\/p>

The result: Your visitors have to wait a long time to see the webpage they requested. And many won\u2019t stick around for that, which racks up your bounce rate<\/a>.<\/p>

Lazy loading prevents this by keeping images and other assets that are not initially visible on the screen from loading.<\/p>

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Instead, images further down the page only load successively when visitors scroll towards them. That way, they don\u2019t clog up the browser, so it can load other parts of the website more quickly. As a consequence, pages appear faster for visitors, leading to a better experience.<\/p>

By the way, that\u2019s exactly what speed testing tools<\/a> mean when they tell you to defer offscreen images<\/a>.<\/p>

How Lazy Loading Works<\/h3>

There are several ways to implement lazy loading. In the past, you needed some fancy JavaScript to do it. However, by now it has become a standard feature of browsers.<\/p>

Consequently, you can simply mark images you want to load in this fashion with an HTML attribute, and your visitor browsers will do the rest.<\/p>

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This is great because it makes it easy to implement, requires no extra code on your website, and standardizes the approach. Because it has become the de-facto standard, this is now also called \u201cnative lazy loading\u201d.<\/p>

Benefits of Lazy Loading<\/h3>

Now that you know how it works, what are the advantages of lazy loading images on your site?<\/p>