If you translate the term ‘lazy loading’ literally, you can conclude that it has something to do with slow loading. But what actually loads slowly and why would you use this option for your WordPress website? Read on! View our WordPress Optimization service
What is lazy loading?
Lazy loading is an optimization technique in which content is only loaded when it becomes visible. Normally, all elements on a page are loaded from top to bottom, so that the entire page is immediately fully available. When a web page contains many images or other content, it is usually not necessary that all content loads at the same time and is immediately visible. Lazy loading ensures that the content that the reader does not see, only loads later. As a result, the entire loading time of the website is much faster.
Why use lazy loading?
The biggest advantage of lazy loading is the fact that your WordPress website will be displayed faster. And that’s important, because literally every second counts when it comes to loading time and providing a good user experience. Website visitors are generally not very patient and nothing is as frustrating as a web page that does not load or loads slowly.
Why is it important?
A website that does not load immediately often misses out on a large part of the interested parties. But even if your web page takes much longer than 1 second to load, that can have a negative effect on the visitor numbers of your WordPress website. In addition, it is negative for your WordPress SEO and Google ranking.
Advantage of lazy loading
Another big advantage of using lazy loading is that, in addition to your visitors, you also make Google happy. Google prefers a fast website and rewards that with a higher ranking in the search engine. Better findability, among other things due to faster loading time, can lead to better conversions.
How to use lazy loading in WordPress?
Previously, lazy loading was only done via Javascript. So a piece of code was needed that controlled the slow loading in your WordPress website. Fortunately, that is a thing of the past and it is now possible to integrate lazy loading into WordPress. Activating lazy loading is also quite simple!
WordPress plugins
WordPress offers many themes where it is possible to activate lazy loading within the settings of the theme. If the theme does not support this component, it is easy to fix by installing a plugin. There are plenty of free plugins for all kinds of content, such as ‘lazy load’, ‘a3 lazy load’, ‘autoptimize, ‘jetpack” or ‘WP Rocket‘.
Influence of lazy loading on SEO
Although lazy loading improves the performance of your WordPress website, you have to be careful that it does not still have a negative impact on your SEO. It is a bit contradictory, but it can happen that by lazyload the images are not crawled by the search engines. This in turn has an effect on the findability of the website. Therefore, check the following:
- Add alt texts to images
Use good alt text with the images. This is a short text used in the code of each image in the article. This text should be short but descriptive and give a good representation of the image in question. The alt text is important to be properly indexed by a search engine bot. And that in turn is important to score high in search results.
- Let Google crawl your images
Make sure that Google can still crawl the images on your website. You can check this with the tool ‘Fetch as Google’. If you can still see the photos in the source code, then it will most likely not cause any problems.
Conclusion Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is just one of the many techniques to optimize your WordPress website, but if you use a lot of images and videos on your website then it is certainly advisable to use this. A visitor has nothing to do with content that is not yet in view, so why would you load it already?
Contact us
Are you curious about other optimization techniques, or could you use some help when it comes to lazy loading? Don’t hesitate and just contact us! Start a live chat or call us on 030 20 72 488. Also check out our WordPress Maintenance Packages.
