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.
When someone visits your website, you probably want them to be dazzled by your photos or wooed by its background images. You want to share visuals that will capture and hold their attention.
However, sometimes your images can take a long time to load, which might lead to decreased site traffic and lower search engine rankings.
According to Pew Research Center, the share of Americans that own smartphones is now 77%, up from just 35% in Pew’s first survey of smartphone ownership conducted in 2011. With a growing number of visitors having access to WordPress sites from their mobile devices, performance optimization is more important than ever before. If you’re not paying attention to your website’s performance, it’s like leaving money on the table.
Fortunately, you don’t need to settle for a slow site; Jetpack’s Lazy Loading images feature has got you covered.
This useful feature helps to improve the performance of your website by only loading images once they actually appear on your viewer’s screen. Enabling this tool helps reduce the total resources used by your website, which will speed it up significantly.
Today, we’ll learn more about Lazy loading images by discussing what it does to improve your website, why performance optimization is so important for WordPress websites, and how to enable it with Jetpack.
Continue reading → Speed Up Your Jetpack Site with Lazy Loading Images
