The best LL plugin I have tried

I have tried a dozen lazy-loading solutions – including the ‘native’ one that comes with Jetpack – and all of them have a downside – usually it’s excessive and visible jumping when scrolling down a page as content is rejigged to accommodate images as they load. This is particularly bad if you start at the bottom of a page and scroll up.

Lazy Loader avoids this through several successful strategies. First it loads placeholders which mean text and other content is correctly positioned before images load. This works 98% effectively with just a hint of correction as images fill in.

Secondly, rather than only loading ‘above the fold’ content, Lazy Loader also loads some of the page below the fold. This means there it is very rare (at least on a land-line connection) to see the images loading as that all takes place below the viewport.

The result works so well I have had to double check that the plugin is actually active as images are loaded pretty much invisibly! Even scrolling down the page fast doesn’t seem to catch it out. Cool. A downside to this approach is that GT-Metrix (and, presumably Google bots) will see a slightly larger page than is the case with other lazy loading solutions, so page-load times will be a tiny bit longer. This is a price worth paying in my opinion as the user experience is SO much better.

Although there is an option to display a loading spinner while images load I have never been able see this in action as everything loads so fast. Perhaps on a slow mobile connection it might come into play?

The only problem I have found with Lazy Loader plugin is a minor conflict with Flex Posts plugin (a brilliant Gutenberg ‘show posts’ block that provides magazine style posts from particular categories). However, the conflict only affects the Gutenberg editor (back-end), where Flex Posts fails to load posts in the preview. Everything still works on the front end though, so this is just a minor issue. It is easily circumvented by disabling LL whist editing a page with FP blocks, then re-activating it afterwards.