Lazy Load IFRAMEs

By  on  

We've known for a decade that lazy loading resources like JavaScript, CSS, and especially images is a massive performance win for web pages. At first we used tricks and JavaScript to do the lazy loading, but more recently native image lazy loading has debuted in browsers.

Did you know that you can also lazy load IFRAMEs using the same loading="lazy" attribute and value?

<iframe 
    src="https://davidwalsh.name/"
    loading="lazy"
    onload="alert('Loaded!');"
/>

You can see how lazy loading IFRAMEs works with this demo:

See the Pen IFRAME Lazy Load by David Walsh (@darkwing) on CodePen.

This single attribute to perform a complex but useful operation is the ideal solution for lazy loading just about anything. I'm so thankful that browsers are implementing APIs that make using best practices so easy!

Recent Features

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Add Styles to Console Statements

    I was recently checking out Google Plus because they implement some awesome effects.  I opened the console and same the following message: WARNING! Using this console may allow attackers to impersonate you and steal your information using an attack called Self-XSS. Do not enter or paste code that you...

  • By
    MooTools Documentation Search Favelet

    I'm going to share something with you that will blow your mind: I don't have the MooTools documentation memorized. I just don't. I visit the MooTools docs frequently to figure out the order of parameters of More classes and how best to use...

Discussion

  1. This browser feature looks really like a huge gamechanger. Would love so much to use it with profit although it doesn’t seem to work correctly for me.

    [First of all, using it with images instead of iframes always worked perfectly, so all this regards only loading=”lazy” for iframes.]

    After hours of testing on different pages, what I see is that using loading=”lazy”, Iframes load WAY TOO EARLY.

    This apparently buggy behavior happens only if the page itself is NOT loaded from another iframe. So this rules out CodePen as a viable tool to show this.

    Let’s make a text.html file from this code, almost identical to your example, to highlight exactly what I’m saying:
    https://gist.github.com/jeff-at-livecanvas/bb1a803465419c62d623305daf6722cd

    Opening this file in a Chrome window, with an internal height of 700 pixels, shows the Loaded! message immediately.
    Same happens with latest Firefox too.

    Would be great if somebody could shed some light on this.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!