Are you getting very low traffic in spite of the many unique posts you have? Did you check if your pages load faster on desktop and mobile browsers?
Your website traffic is influenced by a number of factors like page speed, theme quality, image loading time, etc. If your site takes a long time to load, visitors will leave to some other places having similar posts. As we know, it will increase your bounce rate and reduce the search engine rankings.
A blog post may contain several images depends on its length. They make your content more attractive and engaging. But at the same time, they can also cause the website to slow down.
Is there any way to serve images faster without excluding them from your pages?
Load them lazily.
Table of Contents
What is lazy loading?
Lazy loading is a process of loading content only when it is needed. It is applicable to images, videos, comments, and others.
Normally when someone opens a web page, all its contents are downloaded to the user’s browser at the same time. If you have more resources to download, your page loading time will seriously decrease. So you should lazyload them to defer loading and speed up the website. However, your visitors will not see any blank content and they will be rendered correctly when a user reaches near to them. Thus it will help you to save bandwidth also.
Installing lazy load plugins is the best way to lazy load your content and improve your website performance. It works not only with images but widgets, videos, comments, and social icons also.
| Disclosure: Your support helps keep the site running! We earn a referral fee for some of the services we recommend on this page. |
Best WordPress Lazy Load Plugins 2024
These are the 11 best lazy load plugins that can be used for different purposes-on images, videos, comments, and more.
1. ShortPixel
ShortPixel is a popular image lazy load plugin for WordPress. It automatically optimizes images and serve them faster in next-gen formats such as WebP, AVIF, etc.
From smart cropping to responsive image sizes, this plugin can do a lot to improve user experience and boost your search engine rankings. The bulk compression is useful to optimize all your images in 1-click and create a faster website in minutes.
ShortPixel can process, resize images on upload or in bulk. This allows you to speed up image delivery and gain more love from search engines.
Key Features
Pricing: $9.99/mo
2. Optimole
Optimole is a great image optimizer plugin for WordPress. It will automatically compress, resize your images, and serve them through a high-speed image CDN. Hence, your visitors will not face any image loading issues on desktop and mobile devices.
Image lazy loading is another major feature of Optimole. It doesn’t require any complex JavaScript or JQuery scripts to lazy load images. The plugin is light-weight and supports all image formats including WebP, Retina images. It is compatible with popular page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, etc. Optimole also allows you to watermark your images to protect them from being stolen.
Key Features
Pricing: Free | $22.52/mo
3. Imagify
Imagify is a popular image lazy loading plugin for WordPress. It automagically optimize images and resize images according to user’s device types, and serve them faster to increase your website performance.
Install Imagify, developed by the same team behind WP Rocket, on all your websites to compress your images on upload or in bulk. There is no maximum size for images. Imagify will process your unlimited images without affecting quality and serve them in WebP or AVIF formats to improve your Google Web Vitals score.
If you are using WP Rocket for caching, it contains built-in integrations to connect to Imagify and RocketCDN to maximize your page performance and boost conversions.
Pricing: Free | $9.99/mo
Key Features
4. Gumlet
Gumlet is another best image optimization cum lazy loading plugin for WordPress. It will optimize your website images in real-time, lazy load, and deliver them with AWS CloudFront CDN.
You can optimize all kinds of images including your background images using the plugin. It has a built-in lazy load option to serve various image formats like PNG, JPEG, Retina, WebP, SVG, and others. With their CDN, you can serve JavaScript and CSS files as well to boost your website speed.
Key Features
Pricing: $32/mo
5. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the #1 WordPress caching plugin that comes with minification, lazy loading, and many other functionalities. On BloggingTriggers, we use WP Rocket for a long time to cache pages and deliver content faster. Last month, we extended the license to Plus to avail WP Rocket features on our other websites also.
From caching to database optimization, minification to defer loading scripts, WP Rocket is a perfect tool to ensure a smooth and fast browsing experience on your website. It can also integrate your site with a CDN to load your images and scripts (JavaScript and CSS) at a lightning speed.
WP Rocket allows you to lazy load images, background images, video thumbnails, and videos. Install Imagify on your site to activate advanced image optimization features and serve images even faster.
Key Features
Pricing: $59/yr
6. Perfmatters
Perfmatters is an all-rounder speed optimization plugin for WordPress. It lets you disable unwanted scripts, optimize the database, lazy load media, and many others using a toggle button. Powered by Kinsta Hosting, Perfmatters is a great tool to tweak WordPress and reduce your page loading time significantly.
It supports images, videos, background images, and YouTube thumbnails to load them lazily. Scheduled database optimization is another advantage of the plugin. Create a schedule to clean up your database at regular intervals to reduce page size and load it faster.
Key Features
Pricing: $24.95/yr
7. NitroPack
NitroPack is another all-in-one plugin to increase your website speed. It is packed with advanced caching, code optimization, CDN, and image optimization abilities to serve your content faster.
No matter what type of website you are running. It works across WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and custom websites. From caching resources to minification, CDN delivery to lazy loading, NitroPack is perfect for businesses and online stores to ensure exceptional performance on their pages.
Key Features
Pricing: $17.50/mo
8. Disqus Conditional Load
Disqus Conditional Load lets you lazy load Disqus comments in WordPress posts and pages. Similar to the lazy loading of images, it will show comments only when the users reach near to them.
The plugin comes with all the features of the Disqus plugin plus additional options. Website owners can decide how to load comments (on the scroll or on mouse click).
Pricing: Free
9. Lazy Load for Videos
Lazy Load for Videos allows you to lazy load videos as the name indicated. It will replace default YouTube and Vimeo embedded videos with a clickable preview image. The video will play when a user clicks on the image.
Lazy Load for Videos is highly customizable and powerful. You can convert videos to playlists, remove annotations, apply a custom color to your video player, and add custom CSS codes using the plugin.
Pricing: Free
10. WP YouTube Lyte
WP YouTube Lyte is another lazy loading plugin for WordPress. It will lazy load videos by inserting responsive lite YouTube embeds. The lite frame looks like the normal embedded YouTube, but it will call the YouTube player only when a user clicks on it. Thus it helps you to improve page performance and user experience.
Pricing: Free
11. Speed Booster Pack
Speed Booster Pack is an allrounder speed optimization plugin for WordPress websites. It lets you improve the loading time by activating a number of features. Cache pages, defer slow-speed causing scripts, lazyload media files including images and videos, and much more.
After installing, you will see huge improvements in your page loading time. Speed Booster Pack also helps you to preload and optimize Google Fonts, optimize JavaScript and CSS, manage plugin-specific functions, connect to a CDN, etc. The plugin is free and perfect for all types of WordPress websites.
Pricing: Free
Read 10 Best Free Image Hosting Sites to Upload and Share Your Photos
