Everyone loves images on blog posts as it provides more in-depth details on any topic. An image is similar to 1000 words and even a long article can be described by a single image. However, images are good for grabbing user’s attention but adding so many images on a page significantly increase your site’s load time. Google doesn’t provide value for slow speed sites and you can lose your rank on Google as well. So here comes lazy load plugins for images. By lazy loading images and videos, you can speed up your WordPress site and improve user experience along with saving your WordPress hosting bandwidth.
What is Lazy Loading and What are the benefits of it?
Lazy loading is a technique that loads images which are visible to users. That means if your page contains total 20 images, then it will take a longer time to load full pages, generally your site will be slow. More than that, sometimes users leave quickly after entering a page and it uses your server bandwidth. So by lazy loading your images, an image will appear when a user scrolls to the image. This way you can improve your site loading speed and save your server bandwidth. In this article, I am writing about 10+ Best Lazy load plugins for WordPress.
Best WordPress Lazy Load Plugins
1. BJ Lazy Load
BJ Lazy Load is one of the best lazy load plugins for WordPress. By using this plugin, it loads images when the specific content is visible to users. This way it increases your site speed and saves your server bandwidth as well.
You can setup this plugin easily. From the plugin settings, you can enable those modules that you need. You can apply lazy load on your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images, and content iframes. More than that, it also works with embedded videos like YouTube, Vimeo etc.
2. a3 Lazy Load
Unlike other WordPress lazy load plugins, A3 lazy load is more advanced lazy load plugin for WordPress. This plugin works great on heavy sites that contain lots of images. A3 Lazy Load is fully functional and advanced that supports all type of elements. From the admin dashboard, you’ll simply outline what components are lazy loaded after they appear within the user’s browser.
This plugin is compatible with the computer, phone, and tabs, so from all devices lazy loading works perfectly. It lazy loads all WordPress video Embeds and additionally Youtube, Vimeo and HTML5 etc. you’ll additionally amendment impact and background loading color.
3. Lazy Load
Lazy Load is very lightweight lazy loading plugin for WordPress. Lazy Load uses simple jQuery.sonar technique to lazy load all images and videos. This plugin doesn’t require any additional setup, just install & activate it and it will start working.
4. Lazy Load XT
Lazy Load XT is the fastest and lightest WordPress lazy load plugin. From the plugin settings, you can easily customize it. This plugin lazy loads images, iframes, YouTube and Vimeo videos by loading lazy load script.
5. Speed Up Lazy Load
Like lazy load plugin, Speed Up Lazy Load is also very lightweight plugin and its size only 5 KB. This plugin uses simple lazy load technique to lazy load all images. It avoids downloading pictures and iFrames that are not visible to the visitor.
6. Crazy Lazy
Crazy Lazy is one of the best lazy load plugins for WordPress. Crazy Lazy helps increase the performance of your website by displaying pictures expeditiously. If your webpage is slow because of images, then it stops the pictures to load. Only if a user scrolls down the page and reaches the position wherever a picture really ought to be displayed, that specific image is loaded from the server. This way it saves your server bandwidth and reduces your page loading times as well.
This Crazy Lazy loading plugin doesn’t require any settings to run. You just need to install and activate and the plugin will start its work.
7. WP Images Lazy Loading
This free WordPress Lazy Loading plugin improves page load times and increases your Google page speed score by using jQuery to lazy load images. By delaying loading of pictures outside of the viewport, pictures won’t be loaded before the user scrolls down to them. WP Images Lazy Loading uses “WPILL” technique which is used for long pages that contains many larger images to make them load faster.
8. Lazy Loading Responsive Images
This Lazy loading plugin adds a noscript element as a fallback for disabled JavaScript. It lazy loads all images that are inserted in posts, pages, custom post types and pot thumbnails. This plugin doesn’t lazy load CSS backgrounds. You can stop lazy load for any specific image classes by adding them in the customizer by going lazy load option from appearance.
9. Images Lazy Load and Slideshow
Images Lazy Load and Slideshow is another great lazy loading plugin for WordPress. By its name, you can understand that this plugin lazy loads all your images including lightbox, gallery slideshow etc. Once it’s activated, it lazy loads all pictures in the entire website and adds lightbox impact, gallery slideshow impact to custom designated pictures. This plugin’s functions don’t depend on each other and you can it separately as you need.
Besides, this plugin provides three completely different effects: fancybox, pretty photo, and slimbox2.
10. Lazy Load by WP Rocket
Lazy Load by WP Rocket lazy loads all images and displays images or iframe on a page or post when they are visible to the user. This way it reduces the HTTP requests and improves the loading time. This plugin works all kind of media files like images, iframes, thumbnails, avatars, smilies etc. This plugin is so lightweight and its size is only 10 KB. Like other lazy load plugins, Lazy Load also uses jQuery to lazy load all images.
11. WP YouTube Lyte
When you embed a video from YouTube in your WordPress blog post or page, visitor’s browser needs to make some extra requests (usually 4) to render your page. Additionally, if the video has ads running – several more requests are added. One of the best ways to fix this is to ‘Lazy load’ YouTube videos.
WP YouTube Lyte is one of the best WordPress lazy load plugins for videos. The plugin makes embedded YouTube videos load faster by not loading the Flash or HTML5-player until the user clicks on the video. This is a great way to increase the loading speed of your page if it has multiple videos embedded.
12. Lazy Load for Videos
Another WordPress plugin for lazy loading videos is Lazy Load for Videos. This free WordPress plugin increases the speed of pages that contain embedded YouTube and Vimeo videos by replacing the videos with a clickable preview image. This will increase the page loading speed as it loads videos and unnecessary JavaScripts on when the user clicks on the preview image.
Conclusion
If your site contents lots of images, then you should use Lazy Load plugin right way. Because everytime a user opens your site, the server loads all images at once so your site becomes slow. If you lazy load your images, videos or iframes, then those media will be loaded when it will be visible to users. This way you can improve your site loading speed and also save your server bandwidth.
