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Best Lazy Load Plugin For WordPress

Overview

Lazy Loading defers the loading of content until it comes into the viewpoint of a screen. This can be set to defer the loading (primarily of) images, but more recently iframes (think embedded Google Maps or You Tube videos), videos, audio & written content. This has 2 benefits:

  1. It reduces page load speed by only rendering above the fold content. Page speed is directly correlated to lower bounce rates and higher organic Google ranking.
  2. If the viewer finds what they need in above the fold content, like a phone number or address and click out it saves bandwidth on your server. If you use premium hosting like a VPS or Dedicated server you will have a bandwidth limit so this is of particular interest.

The Test

To test the page load score with the 4 top Lazy Load WordPress plugins and use a benchmark with no plugins activated.

  • A3 Lazy Load 
  • Lazy Load XT
  • LazyLoad
  • BJ Lazy Load

The Judge

Googles PageSpeed Insights. Its worth noting the web server, business and customers are in New Zealand. As far as I am aware the Google insights server is based in the US so I usually add 5-6 points to the result for an LLL (local server, local business, local customer).

The Guinea Pig

scobietyres.co.nz

Benchmark

With no plugins activated (aside from the ones essential for operation) I ran the insights tool to get a score of

Mobile: 65 / 100 | Desktop 75 /100

LazyLoadInsights2

A3 Lazy Load 

This plugin actually reduced page load speed

Mobile 65 | Desktop 74

Lazy Load XT

Same again, this reduced the PageSpeed insights score. I played around with the config and it didn’t make any changes to the score.

Mobile 65 | Desktop 74

Lazy Load

Finally some progress, I tested this 5-6 times over the course of 2 hours and achieved the exact result every time. I then tested the site on Firefox, Crome & Safari & IOS Safari with no issues.

Mobile 67 | Desktop 78

LazyLoadInsights

 

BJ Lazy Load

I got a bit excited here however after some testing the plugin seems to have issues with fly-in animation, and some PNG’s however the score was better.

Mobile 67 | Desktop 79

LazyLoadInsights3

The issue was the image would appear as a white box and load to the correct image in about 0.75 of a second.

Screen Shot 2016-06-19 at 5.03.29 PM >>>Screen Shot 2016-06-19 at 5.03

It just killed the fly in animation effect so I looked into the config settings and found a way to add a CSS class to skip certain images. Once I did this it loaded correctly, however after running the insights test again I got the result:

Mobile 65 | Desktop 75 (back to square one).

I played around with a number of settings including using two lazy loading plugins at once (fail).  I looked into the size of the images which have been compressed well and only take up less than 400kb however there are 4 iframes (3 Youtube Videos, 1 Google Map) so I turned off all lazy loading apart from content and iframes and got the score:

Mobile 68 | Desktop 78

I then compared this to the actual user experience of BJ vs Lazy Load as they had similar scores and found BJ loaded much faster on my browser (I use a page speed API). One of the pages on this site has really nothing but 12 iframe youtube videos so I checked the browser page speed:

  • B J Laxy Load = 0.56 seconds
  • Lazy Load = 4.09 seconds

Summary

BJ & Lazy Load are the clear favourites. For this site with many iframes BJ came out on top. For a site that is more image concentrated (and not compressed) I think Lazy Load would achieve a better page speed score as BJ with full config enabled seemed to bulk up the theme and thus slow down the page speed.

Black Hat SEO The Importance Of Page Speed

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