Lazy Loading Image: A Solution for web-loading speed with Joomla 4
Joomla 4, which will be coming very soon in the next few weeks, has tons of new attractive features. Beside the impressive feature for the accessibility community, another exciting feature is lazy loading image. Joomla 4 gives users the ability to enable lazy loading of images which can help speed up your websites and boost the experience of visitors.
What is lazy load?
If you are a fresher, you may wonder what is lazy loading and why it's important. Basically, the lazy loading image defers the loading of an image that is not needed on your website page immediately. In this case, an image will not be visible to the users when the page loads, it will be loaded and actually becomes visible when users scroll down.
This feature will carry two main advantages for you. On the one hand, the lazy loading image will help you improve the website performance and loading time. One of the most important factors that impact on visitor experience is the loading speed of your website. The fact that images are the most requested data type on any web page that account for 90% of the size of the page. Thus, if the number of images that need to be loaded on the page initially is reduced, it will result in much faster loading pages, better visitor experiences and higher organic rankings for your website . That’s why the lazy loading image is really necessary for your website. On the other hand, the lazy loading image also helps you reduce the delivery costs. Since lesser resources request mean lesser bytes to download and will reduce the total bytes delivered on the pages, your delivery costs therefore will reduce.
You can check out which images are candidates for lazy loading and the number of bytes can be saved by using Google Lighthouse Audit tool. The lazy loading image is supported by most popular browsers including Chromes, Edge, Opera and Firefox. Though, the implementation for Webkit like Safari is now in progress and may be added with the next minor version of Joomla 4.
The lazy loading image feature in Joomla 4 is a win-win solution and more easier for users to implement it throughout their websites.
How to enable lazy loading images in Joomla 4
You can now easily enable lazy loading images on your Joomla site without any third party extensions thanks to Joomla 4. Joomla 4 will come with a built-in plug-in for Lazy loading images. Once the lazy load is active, it will automatically lazy load all the images on your Joomla site.
It is so simple to enable Lazy loading images with Joomla 4. All you need to do is log into your Joomla back-end, go to System → Manage → Plugins.
On the search bar of the plugin manager, search for Lazy. Here, you just simply enable the Content - Image Lazy Loading plugin and the lazy load feature is ready to use on your Joomla site.
From now on, any images on your website moving forwards will be lazy-load automatically. However, you need to notice that the default Lazy Load on Joomla 4 will not give you the flexibility to control where to apply this feature and where not. Despite that, the lazy load feature on Joomla 4 is one of many things that can contribute to a faster loading website and really necessary for your website.
Final thought
It can be seen that lazy loading is a useful and fundamental feature for your website regarding the advantages that it brings for your website. And thanks to Joomla 4, it is now easier for not only developers but also Joomla freshers to utilise the helpful lazy loading image for their website.
Joomla 4 official version will come really soon in the next few months, though you can now experience this interesting feature on Joomla 4 Beta 4 version which was released some days ago. Let's experience and send your feedback to Joomla team to help the Joomla 4 stable version release as soon as possible.
