Lazy loading hid the content that ranked

Lazy loading hid the content that ranked

A recipe site lazy-loaded everything below the fold with IntersectionObserver — including the recipe steps and the ingredient list. Page speed: gorgeous. -28% on recipe queries over a month.

The symptom: pages indexed with the intro paragraph and nothing else. The investigation found the cause in the loading strategy. IntersectionObserver fires on viewport intersection. Google's renderer uses a tall viewport but doesn't scroll the way a user does — content gated purely on scroll-triggered intersection may never enter the DOM it indexes.

Turns out lazy loading isn't free SEO insurance. It's a tradeoff: you trade initial payload for the risk that gated content never renders for a non-scrolling bot. Below-the-fold content that ranks must not depend on a scroll that bots don't perform.

The fix: eager-render the recipe body and ingredient list (the SEO payload), lazy-load only images and the comments widget.

Indexed content went from intro-only to full recipe in ten days. Recipe queries recovered +21% in eight weeks. Lazy-load the decorations. Never lazy-load the answer.