LazyLoad is the best free lazy load plugin for WordPress to lazy load images, videos, and iframes on WordPress. In a nutshell, LazyLoad displays images, videos, and iframes on a page only when they are visible to the user – that’s one crucial way to speed up your WordPress site and optimize images for Google PageSpeed.
You can lazy load images in post content or widget text, plus thumbnails, avatars, and smilies. LazyLoad takes care of iframe lazy load, too: you’ll easily replace Youtube iframes with a preview thumbnail to further speed up the loading time of your website.
No JavaScript library such as jQuery is used, and the script weight is less than 10KB.
Why is lazy loading crucial for performance?
Lazy loading is a key performance technique to make your site faster. You’ll reduce loading time, improve your Lighthouse performance score and optimize your Core Web Vitals grades.
Lazy loading your images on WordPress will help you achieve a better PageSpeed Insights score for three main reasons:
- You’ll address a specific PageSpeed Insights recommendation: [Defer offscreen images](https://wp-rocket.me/google-core-web-vitals-wordpress/defer-offscreen-images/, which means image lazy loading.
- You’ll improve the performance of two key metrics: First Input Delay (Core Web Vital) and Total Blocking Time (Lighthouse metric).
- You’ll make fewer HTTP requests – that is another way to boost your site speed and improve the Largest Contentful Paint score (another Core Web Vital).
Take a look at our complete list of reasons why you should use lazy loading. Then, turn on LazyLoad and make your WordPress website faster!
Dependencies
LazyLoad script: https://github.com/verlok/lazyload
