LazyLoad is the best free lazy load plugin for WordPress to lazy load images, videos, and iframes on WordPress. In a nutshell, LazyLoad displays images, videos, and iframes on a page only when they are visible to the user thats one crucial way to speed up your WordPress site and optimize images for Google PageSpeed.
You can lazy load images in post content or widget text, plus thumbnails, avatars, and smilies. LazyLoad takes care of iframe lazy load, too: youll easily replace Youtube iframes with a preview thumbnail to further speed up the loading time of your website.
No JavaScript library such as jQuery is used, and the script weight is less than 10KB.
Why is lazy loading crucial for performance?
Lazy loading is a key performance technique to make your site faster. Youll reduce loading time, improve your Lighthouse performance score and optimize your Core Web Vitals grades.
Lazy loading your images on WordPress will help you achieve a better PageSpeed Insights score for three main reasons:
Youll address a specific PageSpeed Insights recommendation: [Defer offscreen images](https://wp-rocket.me/google-core-web-vitals-wordpress/defer-offscreen-images/, which means image lazy loading.
Youll improve the performance of two key metrics: First Input Delay (Core Web Vital) and Total Blocking Time (Lighthouse metric).
Youll make fewer HTTP requests that is another way to boost your site speed and improve the Largest Contentful Paint score (another Core Web Vital).
Take a look at our complete list of reasons why you should use lazy loading. Then, turn on LazyLoad and make your WordPress website faster!
Enhancement: Add data-skip-lazy and skip-lazy class to exclusions list as part of the interoperability initiative between lazyload plugins
Enhancement: Use native lazyload only if filter rocket_use_native_lazyload is true
Enhancement: Apply lazyload on background images set on figure elements
Bugfix: Correctly add the rocket-lazyload class when class attribute is empty on an element with a background image
Bugfix: Correctly replace YouTube iframe with preview image when using relative protocol
Bugfix: Preserve youtube-nocookie.com during LazyLoad
Bugfix: Prevent a conflict with WP Rocket
Bugfix: apply loading="lazy" on Youtube thumbnail
Bugfix: Add autoplay attribute on iframe loaded with Youtube thumbnail
Enhancement: Add support for browser native lazyload
Bugfix: Prevent broken image in some cases for picture element
Bugfix: Prevent wrong lazy attributes for srcset and sizes on an image inside a picture element
Bugfix: Prevent matching with the wrong data when a data-style attribute is on a div for background images
Remove data-cfasync="false" by default
Enhancement: Add filter rocket_lazyload_script_tag to modify the lazyload script HTML if needed
Enhancement: Add data-no-minify attribute to the lazyload script tag to prevent it from being combined by JS combiners
Enhancement: Improve MutationObserver code to only call the lazyload update method if an image/iframe or element with .rocket-lazyload is contained in the new node(s) added to the DOM
Enhancement: Lazyload is now applied on the template_redirect hook, which should allow the plugin to apply the optimization on more images and encountering less conflicts at the same time
Enhancement: Specifically target with the lazyload script images/iframes elements with a data-lazy-src attribute
Enhancement: Update lazyload script to the latest version
Enhancement: Possibility to apply lazyload on background-images with a specific markup, see FAQ
Enhancement: Use a svg image as placeholder instead of a base64 gif
Bugfix: Only use MutationObserver if available in the browser
Bugfix: When using the Youtube thumbnail option, correctly format the Youtube query if the video URL is encoded
Bugfix: Improve iframe matching to prevent unexpected results
Bugfix: Update CSS for the Youtube thumbnail option to prevent issue with the Gutenberg embeds block
New option: replace Youtube videos by thumbnail. This option can improve your loading time a lot, especially if you have multiple videos on the same page
