Did you know that 47% of users expect a website page to load in less than 2 seconds? Page speed is important in today’s digital marketing world for several reasons, including increasing SEO. Users who can’t access your site are frustrated with the process. These people will likely leave your brand to buy the product they want and look elsewhere. Moz defines the ideal page load time as between 0 and 4 seconds and has found that pages that load in less than one second have 2.5x higher conversion rates than pages that load in less than five seconds. For most people, the time it takes them to get to your website content is their first experience with your brand. Engaging them with a slow page speed is a bad way to start a relationship.
You even risk losing your regular users and customers. It is where lazy loading comes in. Lazy loading is one of the most important pages speed optimizations you can do to increase SEO and have the best chance of converting new users into regular customers. In this article, we will discuss how lazy loading affects SEO and provide you with four advantages of using lazy loading; Therefore, we suggest you read the rest of this article for more information.
What is lazy loading?
When you create your site, you put dozens of images and videos on your pages to increase SEO. These elements can slow down your site as it takes a long time to load large files. When someone visits a page on your site, the entire page of content is downloaded and served. It allows the browser to cache all the information, but there is no guarantee that the person accessing the site will see all the information.
There’s also no guarantee that people will stay on your site long enough to see all the content you upload. If you load a page normally, someone might look at the top of the page and leave. That means you’re wasting memory and bandwidth loading the bottom half of your page that they’ve never looked at.
With lazy loading, your website loads slowly when someone lands on your site. The top half of your page loads, and the bottom half loads when someone scrolls down to see the page.
With lazy loading, you don’t load the entire page immediately. Instead, it loads as users scroll through the page. This type of loading prevents your site from taking too long to load. When you have a site that takes too long to load, you experience a higher bounce rate. A high bounce rate harms your SEO campaign and prevents the increase of your site’s SEO.
How to know if your site needs lazy loading or not
Just because your site is slow doesn’t necessarily mean you should implement lazy loading. A better approach to optimizing page speed is to run your site through a page speed performance tool like PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
You’ll get several recommendations that may or may not require lazy loading for images. The idea here is to prioritize the things that give your site the best chance of increasing page speed or the most “profit” in general.
How to run a lazy loading
If you want to run the lazy loader yourself, here’s our first tip: don’t! The exception here is if you are an experienced developer, you can take over the lazy loading implementation. Otherwise, don’t waste your time and resources trying to run lazy loading. Instead, hire a professional developer who can safely and reliably upload images to your site.
Four advantages of using lazy loading to increase SEO
When you use lazy loading on your pages, you will experience many benefits.
1. Increases your page load time
Lazy loading is the optimal balance between giving users access to your data and helping you save bandwidth. When you use lazy loading, your audience will get your information quickly. If they find what they need at the top of your page, you don’t have to worry about wasting bandwidth loading the rest of the page. It will help you streamline the user experience.
2. It connects users to content faster
One of the biggest benefits of lazy loading is that users can quickly connect to your content. You slow down the load time when you try to load your entire page. You risk losing your audience because they can’t access your information quickly enough. With lazy loading, your audience can see your information as soon as your page loads.
It is a great advantage because it increases the speed at which the audience can access information. They can spend their time reading your information and loading the rest of the content as they continue to scroll through your page.
3. Keeps visitors on your site for longer
When users can access your information quickly, they stay on your site longer. Retaining customers is important to grow your business. When your site loads quickly, your audience will stay on your page longer. Lazy loading ensures that your audience can access information quickly and efficiently.
As your audience spends more time on your site, they get to know your brand. Brand awareness is critical to helping your business make money down the road. When people are familiar with your brand, they are more likely to choose you for their needs.
4. It helps you maximize your resources
Lazy loading helps you not load the entire page every time someone accesses your site; Therefore, bandwidth and data are saved, and you need less work from the browser. It helps you save resources so that more people can access your site.
So, how can you use lazy loading effectively?
Lazy loading can be very effective for your SEO campaign. Some best practices you can follow to make effective use of lazy loading.
1. Don’t use it at the top of the page
Lazy loading is only effective when you use it at the bottom of the page. You don’t want to merge it at the top of the page because it will harm your site and make it load slower.
To get your audience interested in your content, you must put it at the top of the page. When engaging content is at the top of the page, you keep your audience on your page for longer. It allows your page time to load content at the bottom as your audience moves. It also helps you effectively use lazy loading to increase SEO.
2. Optimize images and videos
Images and videos have the greatest impact on the loading time of your site. These files are larger than most of the files on your site. Optimize your images and videos if you want to help your page load faster to increase SEO. You can compress your image sizes for photos with an image compression tool.
As for videos, it’s best to host your videos on an external site. You can use sites like YouTube to upload your videos and embed them on your page. Since the videos are hosted externally, your site will run faster and will generally increase your site’s SEO.
final word
This article introduced the lazy loading technique and how it affects the site’s SEO. We explained how it works, its benefits, and where to use it on the site. The implemenImplementingiques require experience and knowledge; Therefore, we suggest you always use the help of SEO experts to update your website pages.