WordPress SEO in 5 Minutes –
What is Lazy Loading?

WordPress SEO in 5 Minutes – What is Lazy Loading?

Page speed is one of the most important SEO factors. The average user expects a site to load within 3 seconds. Anything beyond that can mean disaster. By optimising your page’s load time, there are increased chances to see improvements in user experience (UX), conversion rates, and ultimately, sales revenue. Our SEO pros from Perth have one great tip to do that – Lazy Loading. What is lazy loading? How does it improve page speed? Let’s find out.

What is lazy loading?

Lazy loading is downloading and rendering only the visible or critical content of a page. Generally, when you request a page, the entire page downloads at once. But with the lazy loading, only the visible elements get loaded first. The rest of the page will have placeholder content. Then as the user engages with the page and scrolls, the elements start loading in the viewport.

How does lazy load improve page speed?

Many factors affect your web page speed – heavy CSS/JavaScript files, overuse of plugins and widgets, use of rich images, chatbots, and more. As only the elements in the viewport get loaded first, webpages load faster. The rest of the page elements will only load if and when you scroll to reach them.

How lazy loading impacts SEO?

A higher bounce rate, no doubt, negatively impacts your SEO campaign. As page load time increases, bounce rates also increase. And once a user is on your site, slow loading of elements may cause the user to abandon your page faster. High bounce rates can cause your website to lose ranking.

In 2020, Google came up with Page Experience Update that focused on the user experience on a website. This update considered several Page Experience signals, including the three Core Web Vitals metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). However, Google has recently postponed its “page experience update”. Page experience will be used as a part of the ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021, and the update page experience will not play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August. As it is a gradual rollout, businesses have enough time to rework or redesign their websites with page experience in mind.

Lazy loading mainly impacts Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), the first component of Core Web Vitals, the real-world metrics centred on user experience. Read our blog on page experience to know more. Lazy loading can also impact the way search engines crawl the site. If not executed correctly, this loading technique can accidentally hide your content from Google. Search engines can’t crawl the entire site page if your page loads slowly.

Should you implement lazy loading for your site?

It all boils down to the content and nature of your website. If you have a lot of visual content, lazy load will be helpful. You can check your site with a page speed performance tool or the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. Go through the recommendations – defer offscreen images or anything similar needs lazy loading. You may also have a host of other recommendations to improve your technical SEO and page speed.

If you decide to implement the recommendations, our suggestion is – don’t do it yourself! Unless, of course, you are a developer. Lazy loading and all technical SEO require professional developer skills to be implemented correctly. If not done properly, you can end up breaking your site or preventing Google from properly crawling and indexing your webpages.

Have questions on lazy loading or other page speed optimisation solutions? Contact us today or email us at sales@computingaustralia.group. Our expert development and design professionals in SEO Perth can safely implement lazy loading without compromising your current online marketing efforts.

Jargon Buster

Viewport – is the area of a webpage that a user can currently view.
Crawling – is the process by which a search engine discovers webpages with the help of searchbots or crawlers.
Indexing – is the process by which search engines add and store crawled pages to their index or database for easy retrieval.
Technical SEO – is the website optimisation techniques that help your website to be crawled and indexed better.