Lazy Loading Content and SEO

[JusinDuff]

I'v been seeing a lot of websites use a technique to present content to website visitors when the scroll down the page called "Lazy Loading". Does this hinder SEO and indexing since the content is not actually on the page until the user acts/requests it?

[BeytzNet]

Daniel,

There is an easy way to Lazy Load images using JQuery. However this means changing the image's src attribute to nothing and replacing it later on.

Do I understand correctly from your answer that it is not recommended?
(I assume because Google misses these images).

Please advise (and also provide an alternative if there is one for a page with more than 100 images - even though each image is approx 8kb).

Thanks

[Ryland]

<noscript><img class="photo-icon" src="http://www.wired.com/opinion/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/photo_icon4.jpg"></noscript>

is one simple fallback

[danielpaquette]

It does. But there are ways around it. As long as your content distribution method degrades gracefully, there's no problem. Generally, the content I would want to lazy load are items that could be paginated, so lazy loading without javascript falls back to pagination. That's one way to deal with the issue, but generally, if you're dealing with mission-critical content, you'll always want to make sure there's a non-javascript way to access it.

If you're just lazy loading images, there's generally not an issue unless you're using javascript to insert the image into the HTML, which would just be silly.