Gone are the days when a web user would wait patiently for your website to load. According to data from Akamai, nearly 50% of web users expect a site to load under 2 seconds, and they would abandon the site if it failed to load within 3 seconds. Google too has tightened the noose by penalizing websites with high load time. If you’re a website owner and reading this, you know that a slow website is bad news for you.
Most cases of slow page load is attributed to heavy images on the website. While optimizing the images could help reduce the impact, they still can add up to take up a significant chunk of the total size of your website. So how do you keep visitors on your website from bouncing even before all your content is loaded? The answer is simple, by lazy loading images.
What is Lazy Loading?
Lazy Loading enables your website to load images when a visitor scrolls down to the specific image. This means that if a visitor doesn’t get far on the page then the images on the unviewed areas of the page will not load. This conditional loading of images ensures that a lot of bandwidth is saved for both you and the user. You’ve probably witnessed the lazy loading magic on popular sites like Medium and Buzzfeed.
How to Setup Lazy Load for Images in WordPress?
- First, you need to install the plugin BJ Lazy Load
- Once activated, you will need to visit the option Settings >> BJ Lazy Load
- You can add lazy load to content, text widgets, post thumbnails, images, iframes, and gravatars
- You can add a custom image to be used as a placeholder image or leave it blank if you want to use the default image set by the plugin
- Click on Save
That’s it folks, you can now visit your website to see lazy loading in action. We understand how critical load time is for a website’s success, so we’ll be sharing more helpful articles very soon.
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