Are you looking for the best image lazy load plugin for your WordPress site?
In case you are unfamiliar with lazy loading, what you need to know is that it makes your website load a whole lot faster. It does this by displaying only the content that the user is viewing. As the user scrolls down a page, it loads the next lot.
This way, your website isn’t burdened with loading everything at once. And naturally, with a lighter load to deal with, your website’s speed and performance get a solid boost.
In this article, we’ve picked out the best lazy load image plugins that let you optimize the loading speed of images and videos on your website. But first, we’ll cover some of the benefits of using a lazy load image plugin so you’ll be sure of what to expect.
Why Use an Image Lazy Plugin for WordPress?
Images are usually larger in file size so they take longer to load as compared to other page elements like text and icons. If users see that the page is taking time to load or there are broken images, they’ll be quick to leave.
You could compress images before uploading them to your site. However, there is one more powerful thing you can do to ensure even those images load as fast as possible.
The easiest way to solve this problem is to use an image lazy load plugin on your website.
When you use image lazy loading plugins, you’ll benefit from the following:
- Fast Initial Load Time: Whenever someone enters your website URL on their browsers, the pages load quickly and without any lag.
- Saves Data and Bandwidth: Because images on your site only load when the user scrolls them, it reduces the use of bandwidth and cuts the cost of resources.
- Better Customer Experience: Deliver an uninterrupted website experience to your visitors.
- Improves Website SEO: A faster website is always better for SEO and improves search rankings as Google prioritizes load speed.
With that said, let’s look at the best image lazy load plugins that you can use for your website.
Best WordPress Image Lazy Load Plugins
1. Lazy Load by WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best caching plugin to speed up your entire website. It has a dedicated plugin for image optimization called Lazy Load by WP Rocket.
When you install this on your site, you can apply lazy loading to images, iframes, videos, and more. You can also replace your Youtube iframes with a preview thumbnail to improve the load time for your web pages. So, this is the perfect lazy load plugin for websites with large media files and content.
This plugin is super easy to set up. You can download the Lazy Load plugin for free on the WordPress repository.
If you choose to install the premium WP Rocket plugin, when you activate it on your site, it automatically runs and implements 80% of all optimization needs. You can also access the image lazy loading feature directly on your admin dashboard.
WP Rocket has a lot more features that make your site super fast. Explore everything the plugin has to offer in our WP Rocket Review.
Highlights:
- User-friendly dashboard
- Reduces the number of HTTP requests
- Translation ready
- Option to add lazy load to custom pages and images
- Lightweight plugin with script size less than 10KB
Pricing:
The Lazy Load plugin is available for free. WP Rocket Pro plans start at $59 for 1 website.
Get started with Lazy Load by WP Rocket!
2. Optimole
Optimole is one of the best image optimization plugins on the market. It makes your site load faster through image resizing, compression, and lazy loading features.
Like WP Rocket, there’s a free WordPress plugin if you only want to enable image lazy loading for your website. This plugin even lets you reduce image sizes without ruining the quality.
To make things even better, Optimole offers a CDN integration that helps display images on your site faster. All the image processing is handled in the cloud so this takes the load off of your website server.
Highlights:
- Cloud storage option for images
- Compatible with Gutenberg editor
- Replace Image URLs with cloud-based URLs
- Options to add custom watermarks
- Supports page builders like Elementor
Pricing:
There’s a free version available. Pro plans start at $19.08 per year (when billed annually).
3. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer lets you optimize images as you upload them, so you don’t need to go back and edit them later on. You can add lazy load features to images that are already uploaded on your site.
And with its bulk optimization feature, you can edit all the images of a page and the media library in a single go.
EWWW Image Optimizer comes with an admin dashboard that anyone can navigate without any trouble. You can enable and disable optimization features with the click of a button.
Apart from this, the plugin lets you change the format of the images and choose the high compression options. You get tons of features like this to improve your website’s performance.
To learn more, you can check out our complete EWWW Image Optimizer Review.
Highlights:
- JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF optimization
- Lossy and Lossless compression features
- Unlimited image optimization
- Cloud image processing
Pricing:
The core plugin is completely free. If you want more advanced features, you can upgrade to their API plans starting from $7 per month.
Get started with EWWW Image Optimizer!
4. SEO Friendly Image Pro
SEO Friendly Image Pro is the best choice for you if you’re looking to optimize images specifically to improve your site’s SEO.
First, you can add lazy loading to images to boost site speed and performance, but that’s with any other plugin on this list.
What stands out about this plugin is its built-in tools to help you optimize title and alt attributes of all the images on your site. This kind of optimization is designed not only to boost site speed but also to improve search engine result rankings.
Highlights:
- Compatible with other WordPress plugins
- Option to add alt attributes based on the page content
- Lazy load post images and thumbnails
- Supports advanced custom fields
Pricing:
Costs $20 (one-time payment).
Get started with SEO Friendly Image Pro!
5. Autoptimize
Next on our list for the best image lazy load plugins for WordPress is Autoptimize. It is a very popular image optimization plugin with over 1 million active installations.
It comes with advanced features to add the lazy loading feature to the images on your WordPress site. It supports the major image formats along with WebP and AVIF formats.
Added to this, Autoptimize helps to minify and cache all the scripts and CSS styles of any theme or plugin on your site. This helps your website load faster and perform well on any browser and device.
Highlights:
- Compatible with WordPress caching plugins
- Consistently updated
- Image compression options
- Supports major image formats
Pricing:
Free.
6. A3 Lazy Load
A3 Lazy Load is a popular WordPress image lazy load plugin that is easy to use and set up. It offers mobile-friendly support for websites that have a huge library of images. This ensures that your web pages load well on any mobile device or tablet.
A3 Lazy Load gives you the ability to enable or disable lazy loading for any posts, pages, custom post types, widgets, post thumbnails, and more. You’ll also get lazy load options for video embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5 videos.
The drawback to this plugin is that it doesn’t offer image optimization and compression options like other plugins on this list.
Highlights:
- Compatible with AMP plugins
- Fade-in and spinner lazy load effects
- Custom preload background-color
- Translation-ready
Pricing:
Free.
Get started with A3 Lazy Load!
Which is the Best Image Lazy Load Plugin for WordPress?
If you’re confused about which image lazy load plugin to choose, here are our top picks:
- WP Rocket: This is hands down the BEST WordPress plugin to optimize your entire website. If you need just the lazy loading feature, then you can use the free Lazy Load plugin.
- Optimole: A cloud-based image optimization plugin that lets you add lazy load to all the images and other media within minutes.
- EWWW Image Optimizer: A user-friendly lazy load plugin with image compression and resizing features that’s free to use.
That’s all for today! We hope this article helped you find the best image lazy load WordPress plugin for your website.
Next, we have handpicked these resources for you:
- Best Online Content Optimization Tools for Better SEO
- Top WordPress Performance Plugins to Fully Optimize Pages
- How to Boost WordPress Performance & Speed (Expert Advice)
These posts are packed with the best tools and guides to optimize your website content and improve site speed.
Thanks for the recommendations but WordPress now has an in-build lazy load feature so these plugins kinds of become unnecessary unless you need more feature like lazy loading iFrames.