Did you know that around 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less? Are you sure the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) on your store meets that threshold?
If not, you're probably looking for the best ways to speed up Magento to satisfy customers' needs.
Magento 2 lazy load or lazy loading is the concept you're going to learn more about in this guide. in particular, you'll find out what is lazy loading, how it benefits your website, and how you can configure it.
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Are you ready to start?
What is Lazy Loading?
Lazy Loading is an on-demand loading technique that aims at optimizing website loading speed through deferred content delivery, images in particular.
The main idea behind the lazy loading is to load only necessary resources at the viewport instead of loading all of them at once. So the website images are loaded only at the visible part of the page while the others — when users scroll down the page.
Since the system only loads the elements customers need instead of loading the whole page content, speed is increased and the web page is delivered faster. That's exactly what makes lazy loading one of the best options to optimize images in Magento 2.
Fairly easy right?
Let's delve more into details by going through the benefits.
Benefits of Lazy Loading for Your Store
If you haven't implemented lazy loading in Magento 2 yet it might be because you haven't explored its benefits. And they are beyond useful.
Reduce page loading time
It is probably the most common reason why people use Magento lazy loading since the website speed is key to everything: customer experience, conversions, bounce rates, and even Magento SEO.
The loading of images is deferred that's why image-heavy pages load faster with lazy loading. As you can see from the image below, even Google suggests you use lazy loading for your images for better speed.
Improve customers shopping experience
Remember the statistics we've mentioned at the beginning of the article?
A relatively big part of your customers expects you to deliver content fast. Otherwise, they'll just leave without a promise of coming back. Fast loading website leaves an impression from the get-go and Magento lazy loading helps you get that impression.
Save bandwidth and system resources
Lazy loading helps to avoid the execution of unnecessary code which saves resources on both sides: server and a client. This benefit often gets overlooked, but with lazy loading, the server receives fewer resource requests. It correspondingly reduces the consumption time and conserves the server bandwidth.
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| Page loading with lazy load | Page loading without lazy load |
| 7 requests to the server (44.5Kb) |
21 requests to the server (167.5Kb) |
The size of resources that should be downloaded during page load is 3 times smaller with lazy loading.
Reduce bounce rates
It shouldn't be hard to do the math to learn why website speed can influence customers' decision to keep browsing or leave. Website speed could be a direct reason why your bounce rates grow.
Lazy loading prioritizes the content that loads first. Fast loading equals longer browsing which only benefits you.
How to Implement Lazy Loading in Magento 2?
Lazy loading is not a native Magento feature. Correspondingly, it can be configured with the help of a third-party extension like Magento 2 Image Lazy Load.
All you need to do is just install the extension and set the Lazy Load Blocks.
The best thing about lazy loading is you don't have to make complicated code changes or configurations. Just one simple option to fill out. The last thing to do once you set up lazy loading in Magento is to test lazy load on your website pages.
Lazy Loading is an easy-to-implement technique that can make a difference to your website speed. Even though it might not seem relevant, each of the best tools to test Magento speed will consider it while analyzing your website metrics.
