Optimizing content above the fold
On a typical product page, there are a half dozen images. And many of them are “below the fold.” The fold is a term from the newspaper industry where there was a literal fold. You wanted your best headlines and photos to be above the fold so everyone would see them.
In the following screenshot, you can see where my fold is on my laptop and what is considered above and below the fold:
Figure 9.25: Above the fold on my laptop
In the web world, we still use the fold terminology but we talk about it in different ways. And when it comes to optimization, we can “lazy load” our images. Lazy loading means we only download the image once the viewer starts scrolling down.
Prior to 2020, you had to use a plugin to lazy load images. However, as is always happening in the technology space, browsers have developed a standard to lazy load images (https://web.dev/articles/browser-level-image-lazy-loading...
