Google’s Slow Page Guide – Avoid Lazy Loading

Updated January 9, 2023

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One of the few search engine ranking factors we can be sure of is page speed. The faster your page can load on desktop and mobile devices, the more likely it is that Google will rank the page well. But as websites are becoming more and more interactive, loaded with different types of media, it can sometimes be tough to keep your page speed high with all the bells and whistles. So here are some tips from Google on how to avoid slow pages.

Slowly Slowly Losee Customer

With patience and attention spans at an all-time low page speed is more important than ever. Even more so now Google has split the index with mobile pages being ranked separately from desktop pages. Mobile users are even less willing to wait than desktop users, so having a slow sight could seriously hamper how you perform on mobile.

You can find the full details on how Google deals with Lazy Loading pages on their site but we’ll go through the basics here:

Support paginated loading with infinite scroll: Google says you should support paginated loading by providing a unique link to each section, that users can share and load directly.

Load content if it’s visible at the viewport: Make sure Googlebot can see all of the content on your pages, check that your lazy loading implementation loads all relevant content whenever it’s visible in the viewport by using the IntersectionObserver API and a polyfill.

AB Test: Once you have set up your pages as you want them, you need to check it’s working. One way you can test involves using a Puppeteer script to test your implementation locally. Puppeteer is a Node.js library for controlling headless Chrome.

Lazy Loading

It seems that these steps are going to be added upon by Google in the coming months, so it might be a good idea to bookmark that page as Google add more details on how to deal with lazy loading.

What do you do to keep your site running smoothly on all devices? We’d love to hear about it?

Photo credit – Top: Pxhere
                           Bottom: Pixabay