2022 Web Almanac Performance Data Shows WordPress Sites May Be Overusing Lazy-Loading
The last two chapters of the 2022 Web Almanac were released this week – Structured Data and Performance, completing the 729-page ebook of the report. The WordPress-specific chapter was published earlier this month with metrics that indicate adoption is growing. The Performance chapter was written by Etsy performance engineer Melissa Ada and Google web transparency engineer Rick Viscomi. Performance metrics in the chapter focus on Core Web Vitals (CWV), which Google introduced in 2020 and made a ranking signal in 2021. They used the public Chrome UX Report (CrUX) dataset for the report, which collects data from eligible websites – publicly discoverable sites with an undisclosed minimum number of visitors. Most of the data concerns the performance of the web as a whole over time, but the 2022 Web Almanac highlighted one specific concern regarding WordPress sites’ use of lazy-loading and its impact on LCP performance. Google defines Largest Contentful Paint metric (LCP) metrics as “the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport, relative to when the page first started loading.” Lazy-loading is a good thing when used correctly, but these stats strongly suggest that there’s a major opportunity to improve performance by removing this functionality from LCP images in particular. WordPress was one of…
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