Note: Jetpack’s Lazy Loading feature was first introduced in 2018. At the time, few other tools offered such functionality. It offered a much needed performance boost to WordPress sites, especially those with a large number of images.
A couple of years later, a new lazy loading web standard was introduced, and WordPress itself started supporting this standard. Today, modern browsers all support lazy loading, and WordPress itself comes with built-in lazy loading functionality for images and videos.
Considering this positive change, Jetpack’s Lazy Loading feature is no longer necessary. You have the option to disable it on your website, and you will immediately begin benefiting from the native lazy loading feature offered by WordPress itself.
To facilitate this transition, Jetpack’s feature will be deprecated and eventually removed from both the Jetpack plugin and the Jetpack Boost plugin in November 2023.
If you’re a website owner, you’ve likely thought about site speed at least once in the past. After all, Google considers speed when determining where to place sites in search results. So, if your site is slow to load, you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to ranking. And we all know that higher rankings lead to more traffic.
So, how do you make sure your WordPress site is loading as quickly as possible? One way is to lazy load your images.
Lazy loading is a technique that delays the rendering of images and videos until they’re needed. Implementing this can speed up your site considerably, and the great news is that you don’t need to be a developer to put this to work.
Today, we’ll show you how to lazy load images and videos in WordPress using two methods: with a plugin and without.
