Lazy Loading - Speeding Up the Web

At SilverDisc, a key focus for all our web builds is speed. To serve a feature-rich site at high speed requires a lot of work behind the scenes. This blog post explains one technique we use called “lazy loading”, and how it can greatly improve the performance of a site.

A typical webpage will be made up of several assets (images, fonts, stylesheets, scripts etc), which your browser will download and piece together to form what you see on screen. By default, browsers will load all of the individual assets at the start before the page is rendered.

Although this ensures that you see a fully loaded complete page, this can really slow down the rendering of the page and leave the user waiting and feeling frustrated. This is especially important considering 40% of consumers will abandon the site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.