WordPress looks to Lazy Loading in next version

The next version of a WordPress website might just come with a feature that could help your SEO, and you won’t even have to pay for it.

Speeding up websites is an aspect of SEO not everyone thinks of, but it’s definitely a part of the package and needs to be considered.

When you start looking into the field of Technical SEO, there’s a good chance you’re going to come across something called “Lazy Loading”. It’s something many a theme and website tend to have integrated, particularly if you’re paying good money for a theme, but it’s not going to come with every theme that ever existed.

The concept is simple: lazy loading for images delays loading images on the page until a browser has scrolled down to a point where the images need to be loaded.

It might sound simple, but the idea is sound, and means your webpage doesn’t have to be quite so heavy upon load, instead loading the often sizeable images later on when your reader’s browser needs them, and only them.

Lazy loading is one of the more obvious ways to help speed up a website, particularly because it means large images don’t have to be downloaded at the beginning of the load, improving the speed of a website. However it’s also something that’s often built into the template or theme of a website, particularly in WordPress.

That is, until the next version.

WordPress 5.4 is the next version, due for release near the end of March, and the team working on WordPress has signalled that it is building Lazy Loading into the core of WordPress. That’s good news for users of WordPress, because it means Lazy Loading is coming for every user, regardless of the theme they have.