You may have noticed that a lot of large blogs, like Smashing Magazine and the TUTS+ network, are “lazy-loading” images in their posts. Sometimes, as you scroll through a post full of images, you might catch an image fading in just as it comes onto the screen.
This technique is known as lazy-loading. It makes web pages appear faster, and can save a little server bandwidth. Instead of loading all of the large images on a page, you use JavaScript to delay their loading until they’re needed. This makes the initial page load faster. As the user scrolls down the page, the script loads the images just before they’re needed and places them in their spots.
There is a jQuery plugin you can use for lazy-loading images on any page.
For WordPress users, there is an easy to install WordPress plugin that implements the jQuery lazy-load plugin for you.
