Daily Tip: Lazy Load WordPress Widgets for Increased Performance

If you’re looking for small ways to improve page loading on your WordPress site, you might consider lazy loading your widgets. The Lazy Widget Loader plugin is for use on slow widgets with content from 3rd parties, such as Facebook, Twitter, AdSense and others.

How does the Lazy Widget Loader plugin work?

This plugin postpones loading the content of the widgets you choose, so that their content is loaded after the main content of the page that is displayed. By default the plugin will not load any of your widgets this way – you’ll need to select which widgets it affects.

Advanced Lazy Loading Integration

The plugin also includes the option to add advanced lazy loading integration, which allows you to take advantage of the advanced asynchronous loading mechanism. This gives you the ability to include shortcodes that create lazy-load content anywhere on a page, the option to load content on sight and an automatic noscript feature that helps to provide alternative content for visitors that have disabled JavaScript.

Check out lazy loading widgets in action on the Itthinx Lazyloader Demo site. You can download the Lazy Widget Loader plugin for free from the WordPress plugin repository.