Greetings from your Wikia Community Support team,
Starting today, Wikia’s engineers are testing a new system for image loading on this wiki. This shouldn’t really affect either the images already posted or your ability to upload new images, but I wanted to make you aware of the change, albeit minor.
Images will now be ‘lazy loaded’. Lazy loading is when parts of the pages are loaded at different times. In this instance, the images of a page that are “below the fold” (images you have to scroll down the page to see) will start loading only when you scroll down to the part of the page the image is on. When the user scrolls down to an image, they should trigger the image to load right as they arrive at the part of the page with the image. If the image is still loading when you get down to the part of the page with the image on it, you will see the image quickly 'fade' in.
Why are we doing this? To make your experience faster on Wikia. Even though we’re quite proud of our page load times are as fast as they are, we are always looking to improve. This leads to happier users and actually does improve your Search Engine Optimization significantly.
When pages load on Wikia, every image on the page has to be fully loaded first before you can view the page. Thus, images are one of the most expensive parts of the page to render in terms of page load time, so we think loading it in this ‘lazy’ way will make a nice difference.
Thanks for reading! Again, you really shouldn’t see much of a difference, maybe just a split-second of loading time for the images to appear. If you have any concerns or bugs to report, please feel free to comment on this blog or use Special:Contact.