Preload Images

I wanted to trigger an animated GIF on hover. To implement this, I followed a simple online guide to *swap* an image on hover – set initial image as the first frame of your GIF, and the second image as the animated GIF itself. This worked perfectly on desktop, but there was a small but very annoying flash on mobile (on touch). Enter this plugin! I enabled the plugin for pages (setting), then copy/pasted the URL of my GIFs in the ‘Image URLs’ field on my specific page … and voila! The flash is history! Thanks to the plugin author – Ravikumar Patel (@ravipatel) – for such a simple and neat solution for my unique case. 5/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ PS: it took me longer to write a Support question followed by this review, than it did to actually apply the fix! 🙂

I run a photo gallery website for hobby using fancybox, and I’m happy to find this plugin! Initially I was searching for a solution with JavaScript, etc., but this is much easier way to preload images with relatively large file sizes. Thank you for the developers behind this!

Sadly, the plugin does not work to preload a site’s background image when that image is specified in common image urls. Plus, when there is no image specified in the common image urls, the site loads as a blank page with what I can only describe as a spinning waiting icon. Once the spin is done the site does load smoothly with the background image. But, who wants clients seeing a site that loads with a spinning icon for 3 seconds? Hopefully they’ll update so that the background image can be specified in the common image urls, because it does seem an easy to use plugin.

I found myself needing to pre-load some images and started to figure out how to do it by hand when I thought “If you have a need in WordPress, there’s probably a plugin for it.” So I went hunting and found this plugin. Gutenberg made it a little hard to see the meta box on Pages at first, but I found it. I REALLY like that you can preload per page/post, or have them global. Nicely done.

The plugin fix divi image loading error and glitches, and give for your website a speed boost helping in Google SEO.

I am very thankful for this plugin, and of course the person/s who created it. My client wanted an image carousel as the homepage header, which resulted in short loading delays the first run through. Since using this plugin — no delays! Pretty cool stuff.