If your website uses plenty of images to help create an informative and interesting user experience, page load times can be a bit of an issue.  That’s because every time your site loads an image, it makes an HTTP request.  That takes a little bit of time.  If you’ve got a dozen or more images, they’ll all be loaded one at a time, even if they’re not visible on the screen!  That’s what happens if you don’t have a lazy load plugin to help speed up the process.  We’ve gathered up a bunch of the best WordPress lazy load plugins to help you make your site perform a bit better.

Lazy loading can drastically speed up your website, making it so image heavy websites load the most important information first.  As your visitor scrolls down the page, each image will load up and display only as needed.  Nothing loads up unless it’s going to be shown in the web browser.  That’s what they call ‘above the fold’ in the newspaper business.

So, to help you speed up your website, we’ve put together a big list of the best lazy load plugins for WordPress.

Jetpack

Jetpack is one of those plugins that you’re more tan likely pretty familiar with.  But a lot of folks don’t really realize that Jetpack offers a lot of features to help speed up your website, including a built in lazy load feature.  In fact, there are a bunch of features to help make your site more efficient, which helps with SEO, which helps with your rankings.

Jetpack offers the ability to serve your images from a global network of servers so no matter where your visitors are, they can get images from a server closer to home than they would otherwise.  If you go with the pro level of Jetpack, you get quite a few additional features, but the free version does plenty for most websites.  It’s worth taking a look at for any website, but I really recommend it for eCommerce shops using WooCommerce.  In the world of eCommerce, speed is critical, so you’ll want to do everything you can to ensure your site loads up incredibly fast.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin that also offers a free version, so it’s got some options to help you with your SEO.  WP Rocket is a comprehensive plugin that does a really great job of speeding your website up in a bunch of ways.  Considering how powerful it is, it’s still super-simple to use and that can be particularly helpful for beginners. With some tools that mean to help, it can take a lot of technical knowledge to make the most of it, but not with WP Rocket.

The list of features that WP Rocket offers is pretty staggering.  The setup process is fast, you can have WP Rocket set up in just a few minutes.  WP Rocket offers page caching, sitemap pre-loading, GZIP compression, optimization for Google fonts and lazy load to help your images load up fast.  Ideal for WordPress portfolio sites, since they’re so image heavy.  You know how when you go to Google page speed insights and it shows a bunch of stuff you can do to improve your site’s performance?  With WP Rocket, you get an all-in-one solution for fixing those issues, instead of cobbling together a bunch of different plugins to make your site really load up fast.  So, it can definitely be worth the $49 is costs to purchase a license.

A3 Lazy Load

With full support for all the most popular video embeds like YouTube, HTML5 video and Vimeo, just to name a few, A3 lazy load is a perfect way to include video content in your posts.  The very simple plugin also lets you select lazy load for all your images.  Just one click gets the job done.  A3 Lazy Load uses iFrame lazy load which means you can embed content from WordPress, add Facebook like boxes with like buttons, recommend buttons and profiles.  You can even embed Google maps and have those lazy load too.  For a simple plugin, it really gets the job done.  A3 is a completely free plugin, which is the best price ever.

Autoptimize

Optimizing your website can be pretty simple if you select this cool plugin called Autoptimize.  This plugin handles a lot of stuff like minifying you scripts and styles, it places CSS in the page head by default, which is one way to speed your site up and all scripts that can be deferred to the footer and placed there automatically.  Google font optimization is included and so is the lazy load feature, which is why I’ve included it in this collection of plugins.  So, grab it today and help speed your site up without much effort.

Optimole

Optimole promises highly optimized images that retain the same quality as the original. It’s fully automated so that you can simply click a couple of buttons and let all of your images be optimized at once. All image types are supported during this optimization project and even retina images can be optimized with this same automated process. This plug-in serves images from a global content delivery network for free and images are optimized based on the actual device being used by your visitors. It fully supports page builders like Elementor and beaver builder, there is a fully functional free version and, best of all, lazy load images are supplied for every visitor. It doesn’t even use jQuery to make it happen, making this among the fastest and highest performance plugins available for lazy load images.  This plugin was created by the folks at ThemeIsle, so you can pretty much count on it being a high quality plugin to help improve your site’s performance.

BJ Lazy Load

Saving bandwidth may be the side effect of lazy loading, the real benefit is faster page load times.  And as we all know, that can help with your SEO efforts.  Faster websites simply rank better in the search engines.  With BJ Lazy Load, you’ll automatically replace all your images and thumbnails with iFrames that only load up as the visitor scrolls through your page.  Anything that’s not on screen is deferred, which results in a better user experience.  That means it even works well with videos, not just still images.  This is a very solid free lazy load image plugin.

Speed Up

This lazy load plug-in does exactly what it promises to. It allows your website to avoid loading any images that are not actually being displayed on the screen. That improves the initial page load time of your website and I can improve user experience. User experience is what it’s all about and when you are trying to build traffic, anything that you can do to provide a better user experience can really help. Speed up is completely free of cost and like most other lazy load plugins, it also supports iframe videos to help speed those up as well. If you’re using YouTube or Vimeo, even self-hosted videos, your page load times are bound to benefit. Check out some more of the best video WordPress themes in our full collection.

Flying Images

Flying Images is a complete image optimization solution. Including everything from a free, unlimited content delivery network to on-the-fly image compression, WebP conversion and responsive and adaptive images, this plug-in does it all. The most important thing, and why I’ve included it in this collection of lazy loading plugins, it offers native, JavaScript lazy loading. You’ll have a website where only images that are actually on screen will be loaded.  That saves tons of bandwidth and it makes your site load up faster than ever before.  You’re really going to see a huge difference.

Smush Pro

Smush is a pretty cool plugin that gives you image compression and lazy load features in one nice looking package.  I’ve used Smush myself and it does a solid job of compressing images, along with a really fast content delivery network.  Add the lazy load radio button and you’ve got a really functional way to speed up every aspect of your image delivery system.  If your website has lots of images, the benefits can stack up.

The free version is pretty comprehensive, but the Pro version adds a few features like bulk image processing, better compression and the content delivery network.  If you’re already on Cloudflare, I think you can get away with the free version which does a solid job and it’s not going to cost you a recurring monthly fee.  Either way, it’s a pretty decent choice.