Website performance is a very important criteria when it comes to a successful online presence. Every site should load fast, as users prefer their needed content delivered within a few milliseconds. If your site is very slow, be sure that you might loose many visitors and potential (even those existing) subscribers. Search engines like Google also prefer fast loading sites, which is another reason why you should improve the performance of your website.

There are certain things that usually make a site load slow (besides a possible slow server). That is e.g. the use of many images, especially when they are large, resized by the browser or not optimized for web. But what can you do when you actually have to publish a post with many images and photos on your WordPress based site? Fortunately, there is a way to get through this and still have a fast website so you will not make Google rank your site properly, but also your visitors will get a much better user experience. One possible solution: Lazy Load WordPress Plugins.

Speed
Speed up your site with lazy load plugins (Image: John Lee Maverick – Flickr.com – CC BY-ND 2.0)

How Lazy Load WordPress Plugins Work

Lazy Load WordPress Plugins are a great tool for speeding up your site. Don’t get tricked by their name – you won’t get a lazy website. On the contrary, Lazy Load WordPress Plugins will make your site load the images only after the rest of the page has been loaded. In other words – with a Lazy Load WordPress Plugin – users will access a post of yours and they will first see the content and only after that, they will see the images. This is a great technique which will increase the website performance a lot.

4 Great Lazy Load WordPress Plugins

1. jQuery Image Lazy Load

jQuery Image Lazy Load Plugin is a popular lazy load plugin. It will load your images only after the entire page content has been loaded. After loading the visible images, your browser will be ready to load the rest of them. So the left images will load while you scroll down.

2. Lazy Widget Loader

This plugin is a bit different from the other ones as it effects widgets that load slowly. Lazy Widget Loader Plugin works great on widgets loading external data (such as AdSense, Facebook, Twitter, etc). With this Lazy Load Plugin for WordPress, slowly loading widgets will be postponed until the whole content has loaded.

3. BJ Lazy Load

BJ Lazy Load
BJ Lazy Load Plugin (Image: Screenshot WordPress.org)

With BJ Lazy Load WordPress Plugin, all of your images (including post thumbnails, content iframes, gravatar images, etc.) will be replaced with a placeholder and loaded when those elements are in user’s viewport.

4. YS images lazyload (Server-Side)

YS assures you that no matter what kind of browsers your visitors use, all of them will take benefit from lazy loading. YS images lazyload is a server-side plugin which will load the images right after DOM elements are finished loading. This lazy load plugin will also save you bandwidth.

Configuring Lazy Load WordPress Plugins

Most of these Lazy Load WordPress Plugins do not need any special configuration – you just have to install the plugin, activate it and nothing else is to be done. As these plugins only install a jQuery script, there is nothing to configure, nothing extra is needed. So in order to take benefit from such a lazy load plugin, just find it, install it and voilà!

Conclusion

If you want to provide your website visitors a convenient and smooth experience, you should definitely try making your website load as fast as possible. This is not only important for visitors but also for search engines. Besides, having Lazy Load WordPress Plugins installed on your site when your content is rich in photos is highly recommended. Don’t forget to monitor your WordPress site speed before and after the installation to see the results.