As you build your website, you’ll want to incorporate as many attractive elements as possible. Items such as images catch and retain the attention of your visitors. The downside of pictures and videos is that they slow down the loading speed of pages. The reason for this phenomenon is that they take longer than textual content to load. Visitors will get irritated or bored by a slow website or page and leave. The result is low conversion rates, which is bad news for any website that’s why best free lazy load WordPress plugin analysed in this post.
However, knowing the importance of images to your website, we can’t ask you not to use them. Instead, we’ll give you a list of the best free WordPress lazy load plugins. At no cost, you can use any of these plugins to make your pages that have any number of images load faster.
Best lazy load plugins listed bellow:
- a3 Lazy Load
- Lazy Load by WP Rocket
- Jetpack
- Smush
- NitroPack
- Autoptimize
- Optimole
- Lazy Loader
- Lazy Load for Videos
Smush
Smush is one of the best lazy load plugins with the best features for any kind of website. It scans every image you have on your site, scales it, and removes unnecessary data before it goes onto your media library. With this tool, you can compress any image in any directory on your website. Smush even works with WebP format images. This best WordPress lazy load plugin comes with the wrong size image finder. Once you activate it, it will highlight your images with smart scaling tips and get closer to getting a 100 score on Google PageSPeed test.
As you would expect with any of the top WordPress lazy load plugins, Smush is fully compatible with all vital plugins and addons. It works with several popular ones to improve its efficiency on your site, including WPML, WP All Import, WP Retina 2x, WP Offload Media, NextGen Gallery, Envira Gallery, and Avada Fusion Builder, among many more.
If you own multiple sites that you’ve networked, you can use Smush for them all. It has an easy global settings configuration procedure for multisite networks so that you can apply your specifications to all sites fast. This WordPress lazy load plugin supports bulk image optimization; you can work on 50 images at a time.
NitroPack
NitroPack is a comprehensive optimization service that combines several speed-optimization tools into a very lightweight solution. With this best WordPress lazy load plugin, you get some additional functionalities without the need for extra configuration procedures. These functionalities include Amazon CloudFront CDN, Image Optimization, and Cache Warmup. The Amazon CloudFront content delivery network is a fast service that delivers applications, videos, data, and APIs to sites with high transfer speeds.
Since NitroPack comes with Cache Warmup, your users will have all their cached pages of your site updated with the latest optimizations. As this best lazy load plugin optimizes your images, it automatically converts them to WebP format. It works on copies of your website’s files, which means there is zero risks of damaging the original files. With the cache invalidation function, you can invalidate cache files rather than purging them so that fresh copies of caches will still be served.
The critical CSS functionality of NitroPack is tailored to suit many different layouts since it generates a unique critical CSSS for each layout. What’s more, the plugin automatically searches and optimizes all the resources linked to your theme. This best lazy load plugin minifies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
a3 Lazy Load
a3 Lazy Load is a mobile-first lazy loading plugin, which works seamlessly with the most content-heavy sites. Apart from the choice to activate or deactivate the plugin on your pages, you can also enable or disable lazy loading for posts, pages, custom post types, widgets, post thumbnails, and Gravatars. You can also switch the support for video embeds on and off from the admin panel. This plugin supports lazy loading for video embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5 videos.
This plugin supports media added via iframe from any source to content areas and widgets. It is also fully compatible with WordPress embedding on any feature of your website. Right from installation, this plugin is compatible with WordPress AMP and Better AMP plugins.
For a touch of style, a3 Lazy Load comes with fade-in and spinner lazy load effects. You can select a custom Lazy Load pre-load background color too. This plugin is also translation ready.
Lazy Load for Comments
Lazy Load for Comments is a plugin that prevents your website’s comments from loading automatically every time a post or page is accessed. Rather than let comments slow down the initial loading of your post or page, this plugin will lazy load the comments as the user scrolls down to the comments section or clicks on a comment button. One of Lazy Load’s exceptional features for Comments is the ability to set the minimum number of comments to lazy load.
You can reduce the number of HTTP requests drastically with this best WordPress lazy load plugin. Since it is translation-ready, you can use it easily on sites and sections with any language. What’s more, Lazy Load for Comments is user-friendly. It requires a straightforward configuration process. It is also developer-friendly since it avails hooks for altering. The creators of this WordPress lazy load plugin followed the best WordPress coding standard with it.
Autoptimize
Autoptimize – one of the best lazy load plugins – concatenates all styles and scripts before minifying and compressing them. After several other automatic procedures that include the minification of the HTML code on your site, your posts and pages are left incredibly light and fast. Autoptimize is user-friendly, which makes optimizing your site easy. After compressing your cache scripts and styles, this plugin injects the CSS into the page head. On the other hand, it can also defer the aggregated full CSS and inline the critical CSS.
The capabilities of this WordPress lazy load plugin extend from working on images through Google Fonts to JavaScript. Autoptimize allows you to remove WordPress core emoji cruft and async non-aggregated JavaScript. Therefore, this best WordPress lazy load plugin can improve your site’s performance even when it is already on HTTP/2. This plugin offers an extensive API that will enable you to mold it to suit your particular needs.
If you want to take page performance to the next level, you can also incorporate a caching plugin.
SG Optimizer
SG Optimizer is crafted to complement SiteGround Performance service; therefore, it won’t work on websites that use any other hosting provider. Google PageSpeed powers the performance check of this WordPress lazy load plugin. It provides you with detailed information on what aspects of your pages you can optimize further. SG Optimizer connects your website with Cloudflare so that you have all the necessary parameters to carry out full-page caching using the network.
The super cacher settings tab allows you to configure the Dynamic Caching to store your content on a server. This process facilitates faster access to cached pages and posts. If you choose to enable the Automatic Cache purge, this best lazy load plugin will automatically replace outdated caches. This way, your users’ cached posts, and pages will remain relevant and ready for quick access.
With the Environment Optimization tab, you can force HTTPS for your website, enable or disable Browser Caching and Gzip Compression rules. This best WordPress lazy load plugin allows you to manage Heartbeat Control to modify the frequency of the WordPress Heartbeat for different locations. Making the Heartbeat API checks less frequent than the default setting improves your optimization.
Ajax Load More
Ajax Load More is an infinite scroll, and WordPress lazy load plugin for pages, single posts, comments, and other elements with Ajax-powered queries. You can build complex WordPress queries with the shortcode builder that comes with Ajax Load More. To do this, you should add the generated shortcode to your chosen page using your content editor or just embed it directly into your template files.
WooCommerce Websites will need as much optimization power as they can get, mainly because of their use of many images. You’ll feel relieved to know that this best lazy load plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce and all the popular WooCommerce plugins. Ajax Load More lets you query WordPress by various content types. This means that you can make queries by post types, post format, tags, category, search term, custom taxonomies, authors, and more.
By creating repeater templates that have a similar atmosphere to your website, you get to edit and extend the functionality of this best WordPress lazy load plugin. You can even use the plugin more than once in the same post, page, or template. The custom filtering method that comes with Ajax Load More will enable you to filter and update your Ajax query results.
Lazy Load Optimizer
Lazy Load Optimizer enables you to activate lazy loading on images and iframes, which is a sure way to boost your pages’ speed. It is also compatible with WooCommerce so that you can use it for your online shop easily. This WordPress lazy load plugin employs Lazysizes, one of the most popular and SEO-friendly lazy loaders for pages and posts.
Lazy Load Optimizer boosts the PageSpeed Insights results and fixes the error “defer offscreen images”. It is also an added advantage that this best WordPress lazy load plugin is lightweight and fast. It improves the loading of pages with lazy loading image galleries, image gallery widgets, image gallery, product category images, and product images in WooCommerce.
Lazy Load by WP Rocket
Lazy Load by WP Rocket is a stellar free lazy load plugin that is quickly gaining popularity and has over 100,000+ active installations. It supports four languages right from the box. The developers of this plugin are continually improving on it, which explains the regular free updates.
This plugin has all the necessary mechanisms to improve the loading speeds of your pages. It uses thumbnails for all images in post content, iframes, avatars, widget text, or smilies. Without using JavaScript library such as jQuery, the script of the plugin is always below 10kb.
With Lazy Load by WP Rocket, you can even switch YouTube iframes for preview thumbnails to increase the loading speed further.
Jetpack
Jetpack is one of the most popular plugins, with over 5 million active installations. Its popularity is creditable to its multiple purposes, including performance enhancement, site security, and site management.
Jetpack reduces the bandwidth with several strategies. One such tactic is the service of images and static files in the form of CSS and JavaScript from the developer’s server. With this plugin, you get an extensive search for content on your site that doesn’t drain your servers. Via an effective CDN, this plugin delivers unlimited high-speed videos and an incredible image loading experience for mobile users.
You can create and customize your website with Jetpack for unforgettable user experience. You get stats and analytics your site’s performance informing you of what to do to improve your conversion rates. This plugin also offers engaging and robust customization tools that help you personalize your website.
Optimole
Optimole is an impressive image optimization and lazy load plugin that works on your images to optimize the speed of your site. This plugin generates cloud-based URLs and replaces all your image URLs with them. Furthermore, it compresses all your images to the perfect size while retaining their quality. Every month, Optimole caches al the photos on your site for faster delivery and speed.
What’s more, all your images will be responsive on all screen devices since they’ll be scaled and served instantly. Optimole detects retina screens and provides pixel-perfect images. You can also crop images intelligently to retain focus.
Optimole adds watermarks for future images for you. You can serve lower quality images for slow connections. If you want to use Gutenberg, this plugin is fully compatible with the new block editor. The pro version is even more incredible, with many more functional features.
Lazy Loader
Not only does the Lazy Loader plugin support images, but it also supports iframes, videos, and audio media. What makes this free plugin even more appealing is the inclusion of several free add-ons to it.
This plugin also supports lazy loading of background images, scripts, and styles upon manual modification of the markup. Without the need for manual adjustments of the markup, you can lazy load images inserted anywhere on your website. The Lazy Loader also supports lazy loading of iframes, post thumbnails, video, and audio elements.
Other specific options that come with the Lazy Loader include enablement of lazy loading or iframes, poster frames of video elements, audio elements, and inline background images. You can choose to stop the plugin from lazy loading elements with specific CSS classes. Another option is the display of a loading spinner as well as a text area to modify default lazy sizes configuration values.
This plugin also comes with the Lazysizes Native Loading, and the Lazysizes Unveilhooks plugins for more lazy loading functions.
Lazy Load for Videos
Lazy Load for Videos is a fantastic plugin that makes search engines love you with fast loading speeds. It works by replacing embedded videos from Vimeo and YouTube with preview images. The videos will only load if a user clicks on these preview images. This enhancement prevents your site from loading unnecessary JavaScript.
This plugin displays your video titles on the preview images. You can insert ads into your videos and even arrange these videos in a playlist. For YouTube videos, you can remove annotations such as ones asking users to subscribe to channels. Once a video starts loading, you can choose to hide information such as video titles. This plugin allows you to select a custom color for your Vimeo player and even hide controls from the YouTube player.
From the admin panel, you can add custom CSS. Lazy Load works smoothly with multisite and popular WordPress plugins.
Final Thoughts
Lazy load plugins are the reason you get to enjoy all forms of media for a classy website without fear of slow loading speeds. These plugins make sure that no images or videos will load until they are within the scope of the user’s screen. These media forms usually load slower than text content. The lazy loading technique implies that the pages with pictures and videos will load faster and save bandwidth.
Enjoying a smooth website doesn’t have to be costly. Just delve into this piece with the best free WordPress lazy load plugins and select the one you prefer.
