Lazy loading for small teams

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Most advice about lazy loading assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to keep

Only load what is about to be seen. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

Where to start

Always reserve the space so nothing jumps. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The short version

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. Three things worth confirming about lazy loading before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Only load what is about to be seen — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.