Lazy Load Image Plugins for Faster Page Speed

Comment on WordPress Header Images by Erik.

Just some thoughts about image optimization and lazy load plugins, and results of a couple of basic lazy load tests I performed.

I think your sites are generally pretty light on images, on one of my sites I have over 4,000 images, some rather large, so looking for a way to optimize this for the user.

Have already run the images through EWWW image optimizer which I think is the one you use, and that has brought some benefits, at least according to Page Speed Insights.

I have been looking into lazy load image plugins, and just wondering if you have any thoughts on these in general? And if they’d be suited to running with the Stallion theme?

I have tested a couple of these plugins, the first one definitely seemed to bring improvements (using speed tools such as Pingdom, load time was shown to have declined and page size dropped significantly–by even 50%-plus)….However in Page Speed Insights this first plugin damaged my score as it uses render-blocking Javascript and adds 3 blocking script resources, knocking 2-4 points off the baseline.

However I’ve found another one that is described as extremely light and does not rely on jquery. This one (Rocket Lazy Load) seems to bring even better results according to a number of speed tools (Pingdom, GTMetrix, Webpagetest.org), and true to its claims, also Page Speed Insights shows no blocking script resources (and with significantly higher speed scores, 4-5 points, than the first lazy load plugin).

It seems to perform well for the user as well, the images don’t even fade in like you see with some lazy load plugins–you scroll down and they are there already (my layman’s guess is that it pre-loads once you get within a certain distance of the image?). That fade in is a bit annoying to me but with this one from what I can tell you don’t even see it — from a user standpoint it appears to be as if it’s loaded normally and everything is already there when you scroll down.

Based on this it seems a no-brainer to use this lighter lazy load plugin or some other lazy load solution (will probably test a couple more plugins if I can find any others that don’t rely on jquery)–unless of course there is something that I am overlooking with the theme or SEO that I am not taking into account.