Lazy Load Google Maps

Lazy Load Google Maps will improve the performance of your initial page load, especially if there are two or more maps embedded on the same page. I think, it’s no secret that google maps slow down your page load.

Let’s see the popular issue: the default methods for inserting maps into a site undoubtedly create many additional requests when the images loads. If you consider mobile devices, this amount of files can seriously slow down the site.

Lazy Load Google Maps – this is very simple plugin for WordPress and it allow solve this issues. It load JS and images for maps only if the map is in range of visible. Hope, you know about Lazy Load for images? It improves page load times and increases your Google PageSpeed Score. This is allmost the same, but for Google Maps. On demo site Google Page Speed Result is 60/99 (plugin disabled/plugin enabled).

Demonstration:

Important: I use most fast free WordPress Template and it have 99-100% Google PageSpeed Score (depends on the content on the page). If your theme have less result, you will have less then 99-100%. Live Demo: https://extra-speed-blog.webamator.net/lazy-load-google-maps-demo/. As you can see on screenshots bellow, demo post with 2 Google Maps can improves perfomance almost on 40%:

How to use Lazy Load Google Maps

It definitely very easy:

1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress.
3. Use the Settings -> Lazy Load GMaps menu for insert/change your Google Maps API key.

It`s all, nothing else. The Lazy Load Google Maps plugin has been tested with classic (TinyMCE) editor and with block (Gutenberg) editor and from WordPress 4.8.3 to WordPress 5.3.2. In required place you can use shortcodes, example:

[lazy_google_map latitude=”50.449688999″ longitude=”30.52250900″ zoom=”15″ width=”800″ height=”600″ language=”en”]
latitude and longitude values is required, other values just options.

Lazy Load for GMaps: download last version from my site or download from wordpress.org. Also you can download my other plugins or hired me for create specific plugin on Upwork. And you have any questions or any ideas – welcome to comments.