How To Disable Lazy Loading in WordPress 5.5+

A top view of a workspace with a laptop, black notebook, pen, potted plant, and a hand holding coffee. The laptop screen displays THIS IS WHERE YOU ARE, hinting at Lazy Loading for efficient digital workflow.

In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to disable lazy loading in WordPress 5.5.

WordPress 5.5 was released on August 11th, 2020 and it included some pretty awesome new features. One of those features was images wait to load until they’re just about to scroll into view. The technical term is ‘lazy loading’.

Now, why might you want to disable this feature? There are a handful of WordPress plugins out there that already implement this feature that you already use and might cause a conflict. One of the more popular plugins is Smush.

Disable default lazy loading in WordPress

In order to disable lazy loading in WordPress by default, you need to add the following code into your themes functions.php file.

				
					// Disable WordPress Lazy Load
add_filter( 'wp_lazy_loading_enabled', '__return_false' );

In Summary

Obviously, there are a lot of benefits to the new lazy load feature, however, if you ever need to disable it now you have the knowledge and know-how to do so.

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