If you have a photo blog or any other blog which uses too many images then certainly the loading time of the web page will be high. As you know that slow loading of a blog can be disastrous for the SEO. To overcome this, one Workaround is to reduce the resolution of images. But when you reduce the resolution the quality of the image goes for a toss. Another solution is lazy loading.
What is lazy loading?
Lazy loading refers to delay the load of images until the reader scrolls down to the image. By doing this only those images are shown which a user is browsing. Say, if a safe has 10 images and the user is on the first image. If you apply lazy loading then only the first image will be loaded. The second image will be loaded as soon as the user scrolls down and so on.
To apply lazy loading in your images you can use this WordPress plugin. By this plugin all the images including in sidebars and literally everywhere in the blog follow the concept of lazy loading. All you have to do is install the plugin and that’s it. From the admin panel you can select on which images you wish to apply lazy loading. Your choices are for the entire website, posts or pages, on particular posts and pages or on particular images. You can also customize the loading of images as per your requirements.
Using CSS Sprites: CSS sprites is another way to reduce the loading time of a blog when you have many images. In this method many images are combined to a single image. Thus, the loading speed is reduced as instead of many images there is only one image which has to be loaded. To apply CSS sprites to images in a WordPress blog simply use this plugin.