What is Lazy Loading? Benefits & Keyword Ranking Impact

The speed of your website is highly important to both site performance and SEO, and a faster loading website creates a better overall experience for users, and will allow you to rank faster in search engines. 

Website loading speed is highly important for both site performance and SEO, it creates a better users experience and allow your keywords to rank faster in Search engines.

One best practice to improve page-load speed is lazy loading.

In this blog, we will dive into what lazy loading is, how it works, the benefits of lazy loading, and how it can help improve keyword ranking in Google.

What is Lazy Loading?

Lazy Loading is a practice done by developers and SEO experts, that delay loading of non-essential or off-screen resources (like images, videos, or iframes) until an user scrolls close to them

Lazy loading treats the web as a single page. Instead of loading all the content at once, lazy loading loads only the content that is visible at first, and then it loads extra content as needed. Enhance Website performance and improve users experience, this is especially useful for resource-heavy pages with lots of images or videos.

How Lazy Loading Works

Here’s an easy explanation:

1. When a user visits your website, only the content that is visible on the screen loads initially; other elements that are not visible on the screen do not load.

2. Then, as the user scrolls down, all of the images or other page elements load just before they are visible on the screen,

3. Which decreases the initial page load time and saves bandwidth.

Lazy loading can be achieved using HTML, JavaScript, or through plugins, if you're using any CMS platforms like WordPress.

Example in HTML:

```html

<img src="image.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="Lazy loaded image">

Key Benefits of Lazy Loading

 1. Faster Load Times

By lazy loading, you reduce the number of requests sent to the server at once to load the website, which allows your pages to load fast. Speed is very important if you want users to stay engaged.

2. Increase User Experience

Visitors won't have to wait on every image or video to load and can interact right away. A quicker loading time results in lower bounce rates and more user retention.

3. Reduced Bandwidth Consumption

Users will consume less data because only what is visible is loaded first. This is especially useful for mobile users. 

4. Improved Performance on Mobile

Lazy loading effectively controls how "responsive" your website is to users on inadequate mobile networks and can also help to limit load times.

5. SEO Implications & Keyword Ranking

Lazy loading can assist with improved Core Web Vitals which all incorporated into Google algorithm rank. 

- Load time is faster = better user metrics - which include bounce rate and time on site 

- Better user metrics = better ranking signals 

- Better user experience = better engagement - it won't generally affect ranking but can over time 

Lazy loading doesn't improve keyword ranking directly, it will allow for better performance signals that search engines consider when ranking content.

SEO Best Practices When Using Lazy Loading

By following these recommendations, you can avoid lazy loading having a negative impact on your SEO:

- Use native lazy loading, which is `loading="lazy"` in HTML5, for images and iframes

- Always use proper alt tags and captions for lazy loaded images.

- Ensure that important images, like hero images or banners, are not lazy loaded to avoid content being delayed at perceived page load.

- Check to see how your site looks using Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, which will help you ensure that your content is getting indexed properly.

Final Thoughts

Lazy loading is a simple but powerful way to improve your site's speed, user experience, and SEO performance. If you implement it correctly, you can essentially make your site load faster and enhance your chances of ranking in the top positions for your target keywords. 

Would you like help implementing lazy loading or improving your site's performance? Talk to our team at Jaimru Technology Private Limited — we focus on performance optimisation and SEO-friendly web development!