3 ms·

I live in Germany and so do most of my users, so I take the spotty internet rather seriously. There are lots of holes in the coverage even in the capital. Then

• WillPostForFood 3y ago
  it hurts SEO. In my case the user can live without those images, so it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. This is one of the big problems with the modern web, It puts you in this doom loop: sacrifice the user to please Google to get users.
  • donatj 3y ago
    I feel this. So much of what I do to appease Google Search Console ends up actually hurting the user experience. Blind ruled lacking of context.
  • nicbou 3y ago
    I agree wholeheartedly, although for the most part the performance metrics match my needs as a user. In this case it means preserving bandwidth unless it's needed. I lazyload images for the same reason I serve 4 different image sizes.
  • dgb23 3y ago
    The performance metrics in pagespeed/lighthouse etc. are not really assessing performance directly. You can have a slow, bloated website but great metrics, because you’re doing the “right” things. However lazy loading images that are not on screen is generally a good thing. Images are typically the heaviest part of a website and loading them only when needed is good. The article in question acknowledges that, but is criticizing the implementation and failure mode.
    • youngtaff 3y ago
      These days JS is often the heaviest part of a website both in absolute bytes downloaded and the amount of main thread time it consumes
      • dgb23 3y ago
        What you say about in terms of comparing download size: This very much depends on the site. It might be that you're right in terms of trends. I haven't seen any statistical evidence, but from my personal experience a typical website with some images, some JS is often heavier on the image side. Fonts can be large too. PNG are heavy. Videos are the heaviest but rare. However per byte impact on performance (which is a very vague quality) is very different. Often JS degrades performance more than images.
    • brnt 3y ago
      > However lazy loading images that are not on screen is generally a good thing. No. An article should always be loaded in full. I clicked a link to a document, that means i wish to view it. Not half, not the first page, the whole thing. If you have tons of content in a single document, you should probably paginate anyway. Images are usually few, and if not totally unoptimized (which you should do before lazy loading), not a huge drain. By all means, lazy load all the unimportant banners, ads and UI elements. Better still, don't add them at all. Only for infinite scroll would lazy loading make sense, and even then batched by 10-20 ahead (or more), so I don't spend time waiting half a second for each and every image. The heaviest part is nearly always ads and analytics. Cut those down first.
• darkclouds 3y ago
  In the early days, google used those alt tags to help its SEO, but now we have the Eli Parsier Google filter bubble to give us the SEO experience we are looking for as it tries to combat those bots manipulating Search.
• toast0 3y ago
  Back in the olden days when I was closer to the web, and we didn't have the browser to do lazy loading for us, we would always load everything 'below the fold' after a timeout, if the user hadn't scrolled down (or left the page). Seems not unreasonable to not load images that aren't visible during the initial load, but pull them in a bit later. There's some priorty things you could try, but priorities don't always work the way we might want. MDN says img lazy doesn't work unless javascript is enabled, so easy peasy to use javascript to make the images unlazy after onload.