The Best Lazy Load Plugins for WordPress
It is impossible to imagine a good-looking website without images. Maybe in some websites or projects, the CSS or other technologies do not feel the absence of images, but in most cases, the images are indispensable. Although images play an important role in making your site look even better, as all good things come at a cost, this causes your site's performance decreases. But as technology develops day by day, there is a solution to every problem. One of the technologies that will minimize the performance degradation of images is lazy loading.
The main purpose of this technology is not to load all the media when the site is first entered. Instead, it only shows the media to the user when it reaches the media that needs to be displayed. In this way, if there is an image in the imperceptible part of the site, your server will not spend resources to load that image. It only allows the image to be loaded when it comes to the part where it is.
Unlike the standard page load technique known as "eager" loading, the lazy loading technique is extremely helpful in reducing performance loss on websites. That is lazy loading waiting to load certain parts of the website until they are required. As loading everything all at once highly decreases the website performance, this lazy loading technique will help you to speed up page load time.
1. a3 Lazy Load
a3 Lazy Load is a mobile-oriented lazy load plugin that will also speed up sites' page load speed.
As you know, WordPress 5.5 introduced lazy loading for all the images uploaded to sites. Also, in the newer versions, these are extremely improved. But it only works for the images that are uploaded to the Media library. With the help of this plugin, you can also lazy load all the images that are loaded from the outside of the media library. This plugin also allows you to completely disable the built-in WordPress lazy load if it is not necessary for you anymore.
The effect of this plugin is not ending with the images, and it supports lazy loading for the videos as well. So, you can lazy load all kinds of media from images to videos, and also, there is no restriction for the media formats.
2. Smush
Smush is one of the most used lazy load plugins that optimize, resize, and compress images and improve your Google Page speed. It promises image optimization in the easiest way to load your website super fast.
Smush is the award-winning image optimization and compression plugin, as it benchmarked #1 for speed and quality. It can optimize your images up to 2x more than the original without losing the quality. You can optimize & compress unlimited images with one click.
It does not matter which theme or plugins you are using on your website; it will not create any problems with them. Smush fully supports many of the popular products that make your site faster and more efficient.
3. Image optimization and Lazy Load by Optimole
Optimole is an image optimization and lazy load plugin that improve your website's loading speed. It is fully automated and has device-based optimizations. So, it promises smaller images with the same quality and supports all image types. Once you install the Optimole, it will replace all of your image URLs with cloud-based URLs.
If you tired up with guesswork and width estimations, we would like to inform you that it optimizes based on the visitor's actual device. Optimole also supports many page builders like Elementor.
There are a lot of features, such as Format-based optimization, retina support, smart cropping, watermarks, no content shifting, etc. All of these features will highly increase the performance of your website at the top level.
4. Lazy Load by WP Rocket
LazyLoad is the most-used and one of the best free lazy load plugins for WordPress. It displays the images, videos, and iframes on the page only when they are visible to the user. Generally, you can lazy load the images in post content, thumbnails, avatars, and even smilies.
It is a lightweight plugin that is not using any Javascript library, and the script is less than 10KB. You can improve the performance of two metrics: First Input Delay and Total Blocking Time. It is also possible to make fewer HTTPS requests, and it is the other way of boosting your site speed and improving performance.
5. Jetpack
Jetpack is an all-in-one solution for WP security, backup, speed, and growth. It has been created by WordPress experts to make your website safer and faster.
You can have blazing-fast site speed with Jetpack, which also helps you optimize your site on mobile devices. Jetpack is a free content delivery network that optimizes your images. It promises to optimize your images and speed up your site on mobile devices to reduce bandwidth usage.
Jetpack has an official partnership with Google AMP in order to create the highest-performance all-in-one solution for WordPress.
6. SiteGround Optimizer
SiteGround Optimizer is developed by Siteground, and it dramatically improves your website performance. Even though it is initially prepared for Siteground servers and some of the features is only usable for Siteground, you can still use this plugin on any hosting provider, and it does not matter whether your website is hosted on Siteground.
It has a lot of functionalities, such as caching, minifying, and compressing, but lazy loading is one of the most important features of this plugin. It is possible to enable or disable Lazy Load for different assets. So, you can exclude particular assets such as iframes, videos, thumbnails, widgets, shortcodes and etc. Also, there is an ability to exclude specific images from Lazy Loading.
7. NitroPack
Nitropack is also an all-in-one performance optimization plugin that combines everything you require for a lightning-fast website. It has some useful functionalities such as image optimization, code minification, caching, CDN, lazy loading, and everything that is possible.
All the optimizations happen in the cloud, and it makes the Nitropack a lightweight solution compared with other caching plugins. Besides all of these, it promises an incredibly simple setup and cache invalidation, and also, the configuration requires no technical knowledge. You just need to select the proper optimization level: Standard, Medium, Strong or Ludicrous.
There are tons of key features like minifying and compressing the HTML, CSS, Javascript files, Cloudflare integration, Sucuri integration, Multilingual support, Multisite-ready, DNS prefetch, font rendering optimization and etc.
8. Autoptimize
Autoptimize is a complete optimization tool that can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles and injects the CSS in the page head by default.
With the support for WebP and AVIF formats, you can optimize and lazy load the images, Google Fonts, and also async non-aggregated javascript. It can also add inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, to move and defer scripts to the footer and minimize HTML.
Autoptimize has an extensive API available to make the plugin compatible with every site's specific needs. With this ability, you can even reach the lightspeed on your website.
9. Speed Up – Lazy Load Plugin
This plugin uses the "Lazy Load" technique to avoid downloading pictures and iframes that are not displayed on the screen. Speed up - Lazy load is the most lightweight plugin, and it is only 5KB. You just have to install the plugin, and everything will be done by the plugin automatically. No further action is required from now on.
On the whole,
Lazy loading is an unquestionable reason to use it for improving your website performance. Websites with tons of images can have the torture of being fully loaded without having the lazy load. Thanks to this technology, this problem is not a problem anymore. If you are looking for a plugin with multiple performance-increaser features (caching, minifying, etc.), there are many all-in-one solutions in this list. Also, if you want to get only the lazy loading functionality, you can select one of the lightweight lazy loading solutions.
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