Lazy Loading Feature Plugin

Description

Lazy Loading Feature Plugin is an official plugin maintained by the WordPress team. It is intended for testing of automatically adding the loading HTML attribute to images and other elements that support it.

More information about the loading attribute:
Description: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/img#attr-loading.
HTML Specification: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/embedded-content.html#attr-img-loading.

Currently the loading attribute is supported in the following browsers: https://caniuse.com/#feat=loading-lazy-attr.

To test, install and enable the plugin. It will automatically add loading="lazy" attributes to all images in all new and existing posts, pages, and text widgets on the front-end.

Then use one of the browsers that support it (Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Edge, Android, etc.) and visit the site. Best would be to test over a slower connection, with a phone, etc. and test web pages that have a lot of images, like gallery posts.

Things to look for

• Obvious bugs, for example images are missing.
• Try to scroll down as soon as the page loads. All images should be at their places, and the page shouldn’t “jump” when images are loaded.

Note to developers

This plugin is intended for testing. If the tests are successful, this functionality will be added to WordPress, but the exact code may change, perhaps significantly.

When testing, please also test the filters added by this plugin, and provide feedback at https://github.com/WordPress/wp-lazy-loading or at https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/44427.

Reviews

Super simple, instant improvements, no bloat.

Bjarne Oldrup May 17, 2022

I like that, a LOT. This plugin does nothing more than adding the loading=”lazy” tag to images, no dependencies, no extra javascript being loaded. Gives native lazy load in Chrome and Edge, thus improving experience for 63% of my audience, while not hurting the rest… PageSpeed Insights jumped to 100% on both mobile and desktop (yeah, and real life experience is also improved, tested on mediocre 3G connection). If HTML validation is important to you, proceed with caution. Online validator at w3c dot org, will throw an error since loading=”lacy” isn’t standadized (yet?).

“Officially maintained”

deandid March 24, 2021

Yeah, right it is.

Works well on wp_get_attachment_image

Alex August 9, 2020

Add it to WordPress core!

Made such a difference to the speed of my site

IanW June 20, 2020

Been using lazy load in WPFC with problems of images displaying properly. This plugin has made all images display correctly and my site is so much faster.

Works as expected, huge improvement

makkabi May 27, 2020

The plugin just adds the loading=”lazy” attribute, which works fine, the rest is done by the browsers who support it, which will soon be all relevant ones, since Safari is about to implement this feature. This is a huge improvement for the web platform and web performance in general, I can’t even imagine the amount of data (and thus time, energy, CO2, money…) this will save once WP implements it in core. The lazy loading experience itself is ok – you DO sometimes see images pop up, but that’s a price worth paying, and browsers will hopefully improve this by starting the loading at just the right time.

Big hopes

Rafa? April 29, 2020

Lazy to do the job. Stopped working.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

Please see the Github repository: https://github.com/WordPress/wp-lazy-loading.