How Lazy Loading Helps Decrease Page Load Time and Boost Engagement?

No matter how amazing a website is in terms of its look and feel, it will turn visitors away if the web pages take time to load. No one likes slow-loading websites. It is one of the pet peeves of web visitors. If you want to improve their web experience, the first thing that you should do is make your web pages load fast.

Related: 8 Effective Ways To Improve Customer Experience On Your Website

What causes the slowness of a web page? Why does the delay happen? Well, one possible reason can be the size of the page. By that, we mean the amount of content on that page in the form of texts, images, videos, or other media files. You may get suggested to reduce the content on those pages in order to improve their loading speed. However, if your existing content is extremely important for your site visitors to know about your brand or business, and you don’t want to mess around with it, there’s one way that doesn’t require cutting content. It is called Lazy Loading.

What is Lazy Loading?

Lazy loading (also referred to as on-demand loading) is a page optimization technique that delays the loading of non-critical resources until they are actually needed. Put simply, a web page would initially load only a fraction of the page content and would wait to load the remaining content until the user needs it. For example, if a web page contains an image for which a user would have to scroll down in order to see it, that image won’t be loaded until the user has scrolled down to that section. So, instead of loading or rendering the entire web page at once, the lazy loading technique ensures that only the required content is loaded. This helps improve page performance.

“Google Images” is a great example of lazy loading. When you search for images of something, it will display multiple results, however, Google won’t reveal or load all the image results at once, and it doesn’t make sense either. It’s unlikely that the user would go past a few initial pages, so there’s no point in loading all images until the user keeps scrolling through.

For unrevealed images, Google uses placeholders to substitute the actual images. Only when the user scrolls down through a placeholder image, it is quickly replaced by the actual image. The reason for putting these placeholders is they take relatively much lesser time to load than fully rendered images.

It’s not just Google that uses the lazy loading or on-demand technique. It is used all over the web. Most websites (primarily eCommerce websites) that contain too many images, use this technique. Though the technique is most commonly used on images, it can be implemented for various other web page content such as text and videos.

Why Use The Lazy Loading Technique?

There are a couple of strong reasons why you should use the lazy loading technique rather than loading the entire stuff.

1. First of all, as we mentioned before, there is an extremely low possibility of a user going past the first few pages. So, loading content that the user may never see would only affect the performance of the web page and the overall website.

2. Lazy loading makes your page load faster. This ultimately improves the experience of your web visitors, boosts engagement and conversions, and helps with your SEO.

3. Loading all images at once would only increase the data usage of the users. On limited mobile or Internet data, this would consume more data and also further slow down the loading speed. Using the lazy loading technique would thus help conserve the user data.

4. Lazy loading reduces processing time, battery consumption, and the use of other system resources. Long story short, using the lazy loading technique would significantly improve the page load time, page performance, and boost user engagement.

How to Implement Lazy Loading?

While implementing lazy loading, you should consider the different supported browsers and what exactly you want to lazy load. In modern browsers, it can be enabled using the “loading” attribute on images and iframes, while on older browsers, you can implement a solution with your own JavaScript.

Also, there are a number of open-source libraries which can be used to implement lazy loading, such as-

1. Blazy.js- it’s a javascript library for lazy loading and multi-serving images, videos, and other resources.

2. Lazy Load- it is a script that loads images as soon as they enter the viewport.

One easy option to implement lazy loading is using an add-on. You can search for a good one on your CMS or website builder.

When to Use Lazy Loading?

Lazy loading is ideal for websites that are media-rich (i.e. having too many images, videos, or GIFs) so that users do not feel the page load delay which can happen if all the images on a web page are loaded instantly.

Though there aren’t any specific guidelines as to what web pages require lazy loading, you can analyze your site’s performance and take a call accordingly.

Summing Up

Lazy loading is an excellent option to improve the performance of your web pages and make visitors stay on your website. There’s no point in unnecessarily loading the content that the users may never see. Just make sure to test your website with this technique before implementing it.