Images and embedded videos on your WordPress website are one of the primary reasons for its increased load time. More massive images and videos are the main reason for ruining a user-experience because they take a lot of time to load and leave the visitors overwhelmed. Lazy load plugins can quickly solve this problem without causing any further issues.
What Exactly Is Lazy Loading?
Lazy loading is a process of delaying the time duration for loading the images and embedded videos to boost up the loading process of your website. Having no lazy loading plugin on your website can cause problems like waiting for a long time for all the images to load, and your website becomes ready for use.
You must know that Google is not kind to the websites that take a longer time to load because it leads to a frustrating experience for the users. Mostly, people give up on websites because they have to wait for a long time to see their content. If you want to enhance the user experience of your website, you must use a lazy loading plugin, and such kind of plugins are now considered as part of the WordPress website development process.
8 Best WordPress Lazy Load Plugins
1. a3 Lazy Load
Having a lot of content and images on your website can cause more loading time of it. But this plugin may be best for your website because it not only loads your pictures quickly, but it can also load your embedded videos at a faster speed. If you own a WooCommerce website, then you got lucky because it is the best lazy load plugin for your WooCommerce site.
Most website owners complain about plugins that don’t work well with other advanced plugins and are not mobile-friendly. If you are one of them, then don’t worry about it, because a3 Lazy Load is a mobile-responsive plugin, which works well with other advanced plugins.
2. Rocket Lazy Load
Rocket lazy load is another WordPress plugin, which helps you to enhance the user experience by minimizing the load time of your website.
The best thing about this plugin is that it is just a 2 kb script with a lot of features and benefits. This plugin does all the job of making sure that all graphics, which include thumbnails, avatars, and galleries are loading as your visitors scroll down your website.
With this plugin, visitors experience a better user interface because they do not have to wait endlessly for the images to load properly. The best thing is, this plugin is not cluttered with lots and lots of options. It is an easy-to-use, user-friendly plugin.
3. Optimole
By using cloud-based technology, this plugin creates the URLs and replace all your images with those URLs. Simply, it means that the size of your images is reduced without affecting the quality of your images. Keep in mind that this plugin is only for images and not for embedded videos.
For improving the speed of your website, Optimole gets all the images of your website every month and deliver them with greater speed to enhance the useability of your website.
This plugin can be used with the new block editor, so you won’t face any issues if your block editor upgrades to a newer version.
4. Smush – Compress, Image Optimizer, Lazy Load, WebP Images
As its name indicates, this plugin is not only used for lazy loading images, but it also allows you to compress and optimize your images. It provides an in-built image compressor and optimizer. The best thing about this plugin is that it won’t compromise the quality of images while compressing them.
This plugin features include image compressor and optimizer, lazy load images, Gutenberg integration, no monthly limit, and much more.
5. Autoptimize
Autoptimize is actually an optimizing tool that increases the speed of your website by optimizing it. It offers a significant number of features that can be helpful for your website. Some of the features of this plugin include Google fonts optimization, speed booster pack, lazy loading images, downsize scripts and styles, etc.
6. Lazy Load for Videos
This plugin is built explicitly for lazy loading embedded videos by replacing them with clickable previews. These previews improve the speed of your website significantly. One of the best feature of this plugin is that it loads embedded videos in privacy-enhanced mode.
Some of the fantastic features of this plugin include lazy video loading in text widgets, multiple play button options, prevent showing related videos at the end of videos, and much more.
7. Lazy Load for Images
Lazy Load for Images is another plugin for lazy loading your website’s assets, including Gravatars, thumbnails, post images, etc. You can lazy load all of these elements of your website on a click.
All you have to do is download this plugin, and there is no need to alter settings. Just activate it and use its unique features. Some of the features include improved loading speed, Gravatar support, reduction in HTTP requests, etc.
8. Lazy Loader
Lazy loader plugin supports images, audio, iframes, and video elements. You can easily lazy load images, styles and background scripts by manually modifying the markup, using this plugin. It also supports background images and posts thumbnails.
The one thing you must keep in mind before using it is that this plugin only works on PHP 7 or higher, so make sure you have an updated version of WordPress. Its features include lazy loading for images, iframes, background images, and videos. You can also choose specific pages and posts for lazy loading.
The Bottom Line
All of the lazy load plugins discussed above provide the best features and functions to enhance the speed and user experience of your website. You can choose any one of them for your WordPress website. If you still have any queries, you can ask Two Runs WordPress developers. They will guide you with everything and will answer your queries in the most satisfied manner.
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