Asynchronous Image Loader jQuery Plugin: JAIL

While optimizing website, the foremost element that you need to take care of is optimizing graphics because they owe a lot to the total load time of a web page. Websites that use a lot of imagery such as portfolio websites need to be optimized for faster processing and rendering of images.

However, this is not possible all the time. Some times you really need to display large images that eventually cause the web page to load slowly in the browser. However, this can be avoided by using asynchronous method of loading and displaying images. In simple words, the idea behind this technique is to load page contents first and graphics/imagery later. This not only gives a better user experience but also help you display web pages in a better way on slow internet connections or on mobile devices for that matter.

Using asynchronous techniques to load images in web browser is now made easy with jQuery Asynchronous Image Loader plugin (JAIL). JAIL is a lightweight plugin for jQuery helps loading images asynchronously and it can be used to make your page load faster.

The main concept behind this plugin is deferring the loading of the images after the page is loaded. You can control image loading with different triggers (such as click, mouseover, and scroll) or after a specified delay. JAIL works even when JavaScript is not enabled or the web browser.