WordPress 5.9 to Fix Lazy Loading Performance Regression, Resulting in 30% Faster Page Loads in Some Cases
WordPress sites may soon see a slight performance improvement on page loads, thanks to a fix for a performance regression in the core lazy loading feature. An analysis published in July 2021 showed that lazy loading applied too aggressively can have a negative impact on performance and that it’s better to eagerly load the images within the initial viewport. WordPress’ default of lazy loading all images was causing slower performance on the Largest Contentful Paint metric (LCP) metric, which Google defines as “the render time of the largest image or text block visible within the viewport, relative to when the page first started loading.” Google-sponsored WordPress contributors wrote a fix that avoids lazy-loading images above the fold and thoroughly tested it as part of their efforts to evaluate the impact of various past performance initiatives. The delayed LCP will be fixed in WordPress 5.9. “This can be improved by skipping addition of loading=’lazy’ for the first content image or iframe, which in the vast majority of cases will appear within the initial viewport,” Felix Arntz said in the dev note. “WordPress can only make educated guesses around that and not be 100% certain, but an analysis taking into account 50 popular themes showed that the enhancement brought…
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