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Wijax Widget Lazy Loader

Idea: A simple way to improve load-time performance by lazy loading some of the content on the page.

Answer: Wijax.

The more content in the initial download of the page, the longer readers have to wait to see it. Some content is critical to each page load, but why make people wait for every last piece of the page before they can start reading the post they came to see? Wijax allows you to defer loading widgets on the page so that they arrive after the main content.

The component is in the development version of bSuite now, and it works very simply: it creates a new sidebar area in your dashboard where you can configure the widgets you want to use (see right, right), then you place the Wijax Widget (below, left) in the sidebar where you want the lazy-loaded widget to appear.

The result can look something like the image below (or scroll to the bottom of this page to see it live). Deferring the text and markup doesn’t save much time or bandwidth (less than 4KB), but those four images add up to around 90KB. Significantly, you didn’t have to wait for the server to generate those components in the footer before you could start reading this blog post.