The gallery you’re proudest of is often the heaviest page on your site. A full wedding or a year of landscapes can put a hundred photos or more on one page.
Lazy loading lets that page open fast. It shows the photos on screen first and brings in the rest as your visitor scrolls, without shrinking a single photo.
Here’s what lazy loading is, what it means for SEO, and how to add it to your WordPress galleries without writing any code.
What Is Lazy Loading?
Lazy loading loads a web page in the order your visitor sees it. The photos on screen load straight away, and the ones further down wait until the visitor scrolls near them.
Think of a client leafing through a printed album. They see each spread as they turn to it, rather than the whole album at once.
Lazy loading doesn’t change your photos. Only the timing changes, so every photo arrives at the same size and quality.
Why Lazy Loading Matters for Photography Sites
Photography pages carry more images than most. A single gallery can hold dozens or hundreds of photos, and each one adds to what the page has to load.
Plenty of your visitors browse on phones, some on mobile data. With lazy loading, the first photos appear quickly, and that first impression counts when a client is judging your work.
It also saves data. Photos nobody scrolls to are never downloaded, which is kinder to your visitors and your hosting.
How Lazy Loading Affects SEO
Done well, lazy loading can support your SEO. Google says its ranking systems look to reward a good page experience, and a gallery page that opens fast is part of that.
Search engines can still find your lazy loaded photos. Google’s lazy loading guidance lists the browser’s built-in lazy loading among the methods its search can follow. WordPress uses that method for you.
The one habit worth building is to keep the photos at the very top of a page loading straight away. On a photography site, that usually means your header image and the first row of a gallery.
Search engines also read the words that describe your photos. Imagely lets you add alt text and captions to every photo on every plan, and our guide to WordPress image captions shows how.
Let the first photos visitors see load straight away, and lazy load everything below them. See how Mosaic handles this
How to Add Lazy Loading to Your Imagely Galleries
WordPress lazy loads the photos in your posts on its own. For galleries built with Imagely, the WordPress gallery plugin, here are three easy ways to add it, each suited to a different layout or plan.
Turn On Lazy Loading in the Mosaic Gallery
The Mosaic Gallery has its own lazy loading, included with Imagely Starter and up. It shows your first photos straight away and adds more as the visitor scrolls.
Open your gallery in the gallery editor and go to the Customize step with Mosaic selected. Make sure Enable “lazy” image loading is switched on.
Two number fields sit below it. Images to display at start sets how many photos load first, and Images to load when scrolling sets how many arrive with each scroll.
For a long portfolio, I’d set the starting number high enough to fill a laptop screen. Visitors see a full gallery straight away, and scrolling brings in the rest.
With this setting on, your Mosaic galleries need no separate lazy load plugin.
Let Your Longest Galleries Load as Visitors Scroll
The Mosaic Gallery comes with Imagely Starter and up. Switch on its lazy loading and your wedding and landscape galleries open fast, then fill in as visitors scroll.
Add a Lazy Load Plugin for Your Other Gallery Layouts
For your other Imagely layouts, a lazy load plugin does the job. It works on every plan, including the free one, and you have two easy routes:
- A free lazy load plugin: Lazy Load by WP Rocket is free on WordPress.org and handles your gallery photos with the rest of the page. After activating it, open its LazyLoad page under Settings, tick Images and save.
- The speed plugin you already run: if you use WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache or EWWW Image Optimizer, switch on its lazy loading and it covers galleries too.
Once lazy loading is switched on, open your gallery page in a private browser window. Scroll down, and your photos arrive as you reach them.
Split Large Galleries Into Pages
In Imagely’s gallery editor, the Images per page setting splits a big gallery into pages, so visitors load one page of photos at a time. You’ll find it in the Customize step of the Thumbnails layout, included on every plan.
For a full wedding with hundreds of photos, pages plus a lazy load plugin make a fast free setup. Each page stays light, and the plugin holds back the photos lower down it.
Lazy Loading Is One Part of a Fast Photography Site
A fast gallery page comes from a few tools doing their own part. Imagely keeps its gallery files lean, your optimization plugin shrinks the photos, and Imagely CDN can serve them from servers close to each visitor.
Since the 4.2.3 update, pages without a gallery load no gallery files at all. The Masonry, Mosaic, Tile and Blog Style layouts also keep their shape while photos load.
Imagely can also resize photos as you upload them, so your galleries don’t carry full-size camera files.
In Imagely’s own tests, a standard gallery page went from 767 KB to 189 KB. The 4.2.3 release announcement has the details.
FAQs About Lazy Loading Images in WordPress
Does WordPress lazy load images automatically?
Yes, for the images in your posts and pages. Imagely galleries get their lazy loading from the Mosaic Gallery’s own setting or from a lazy load plugin.
Does Imagely lazy load gallery images?
The Mosaic Gallery does, from Imagely Starter up, once you switch on Enable “lazy” image loading. For other layouts, add a lazy load plugin, or split a Thumbnails gallery into pages with Images per page.
Is lazy loading bad for SEO?
No. It helps pages load faster, and search engines can find photos lazy loaded in standard ways. Just let the first photos at the top of the page load straight away.
Does lazy loading lower my photo quality?
No. The same photos load at the same quality, just when the visitor reaches them.
Do I need a lazy load plugin if I use Imagely?
For Mosaic galleries with lazy loading switched on, no. For your other layouts, a lazy load plugin is the easy way to add it, and Images per page keeps very large galleries light.
A long gallery can open as fast as a short one once lazy loading is in place. Be sure to check out our WordPress image optimization guide for photographers to get your photo files ready too.
Don’t have Imagely yet? Get started today!
For more photography tips and WordPress tutorials, check out our blog.
Do you also recommend Jetpack’s Lazy Load?
Thanks,
Steve
We do not recommend using Jetpack in general because it’s more of a swiss army knife plugin. We recommend plugins with a specific focus.
Thank you for the explanation! It’s funny when you are trying to optimize your blog how, when you see, “lazy loading”, unless you google it doesn’t sound like a good thing.