Why Lazy Loading Can Delay Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

In a recent episode of Google’s Search Off the Record podcast, Martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed when lazy loading helps and when it can slow pages.

Splitt used a real-world example on developers.google.com to illustrate a common pattern: making every image lazy by default can delay Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) if it includes above-the-fold visuals.

Splitt said:

“The content management system that we are using for developers.google.com … defaults all images to lazy loading, which is not great.”

Splitt used the example to explain why…