Lazy Load of Images affect SEO?

[JesterMagic]

I am trying to speed up my site and have enabled the lazy load option of a popular optimize plugin I am using for a Joomla site.

One of the reason I decided to do this is the server I am on does not support HTTP/2 yet and on a number of pages thumbnails do load.

Things seem to be working fine and the Google PageSpeed Insights tool has bumped my score up a bit.

Is there anything negative I need to consider in regards to SEO with lazy loading of images? It's a information site which does have images but it's more about my information ranking well than images.

[keyplyr]

Google said that these methods were advantageous with Mobile, helping load time, and beneficial to the visitor... but failed to be definitive when it came to desktop. This was in a regarding the Mobile-First Index [webmasterworld.com] so my take on that is...

If it is beneficial for the Mobile user, and all sites/pages will soon be indexed according to the merits of your Mobile site, then it's a positive thing for both Mobile & Desktop.

Since this plugin is written in JS and doesn't rely on third-party libraries, it's fast and doesn't require additional HTTP requests.

[Peter_S]

The only "non-positive" effect, (which is different from "negative"), might be that your images may not be indexed by Google Image Search. Googlebot executes javascript, but if your lazy loading is based on page scrolling, it might not simulate this scrolling. All depends of the kind of images, so it might not have a real impact after all. You can also select which images to lazy load and which not, like that you have a good balance.