Hi 👋! My name is Ben Morss. I’m a Developer Advocate at Google, where my job is to help make it easier to make websites that are excellent for everyone. I also used to be a "serious" musician, so you can still find me recording songs in the attic that's now my workspace. And laboring on my opera that's sort of about Steve Jobs.

A few weeks ago, Joomla and Google announced a new sponsorship as part of Google’s efforts to support the open-source CMS community during these challenging times and to advance our shared goal of enabling amazing content on the web.

Google is no stranger to partnering with CMS communities. Whether we're providing platform-specific guidance in our developer tools, like Lighthouse, collaborating on WordPress plugins that enable superior integration with Search and AMP, or bringing new mobile-friendly formats to the web, like the open source Web Stories editor, we want open source CMSs to continue fostering a thriving web ecosystem.

But what’s in it for Joomla? How will it all work? Well, we’ve already kicked off a few projects. We wanted to tell you about one in particular - lazy-loading images and iframes without a plugin in Joomla core. Automatic lazy loading appeared on the web in 2019, was adopted as a WHATWG HTML standard, and is already supported by most major browsers. It provides an easy way to speed up load times and decrease data usage for users everywhere.

Google engineers worked with the Joomla contributor team to determine whether Joomla could benefit from adopting the new lazy-loading feature in core, and to help troubleshoot some of the unique challenges on Joomla, like limiting layout shift by including image dimensions and avoiding a JavaScript-based fallback. The feedback we got from the Joomla developer team also helped us to improve our own implementations and the guidance we share with all CMS developers. The Joomla community has already included this feature in the upcoming 4.X release. We're looking forward to watching it speed up Joomla sites soon!

So what’s next? You tell us! We can’t wait to meet more of the Joomla community, to learn more about the opportunities and challenges you face, and to find out how Google can help. We are passionate about making the web faster, more secure, and more accessible for everyone, and about adding new capabilities and tools to make developers' lives easier. We would love to hear your ideas!

You can reach out to me on Twitter at @benmorss. Stay tuned for more content, best practices, and collaborations from the Google and Joomla partnerships team.