What is Progressive Rendering?

Introduction

Have you ever measured your website’s loading speed? If not, there are many tools available online for testing website speed. Search for any and measure. If your website loads in more than 3 seconds, according to a study published by Google, this means you’re losing 32% of your visitors.

So, if you’re taking steps to reduce your website’s loading speed, progressive rendering comes into the picture, allowing developers to increase it.

What is Progressive Rendering?

Before discussing progressive rendering techniques, let’s try to understand the term. Progressive means gradually displaying one thing after another, just like normal progress. You may have seen it when downloading or uploading files, or even updating mobile apps.

Rendering means displaying the content on a web page. The full name for the term progressive rendering is displaying different components of a web page one by one, rather than displaying everything at once.

Here’s a definition of progressive rendering.

Progressive rendering is a technique in which web developers break down a web page’s code into smaller, more manageable chunks and display all of them one by one to increase the performance of the web page.

How does progressive rendering work?

Now, let’s understand how progressive rendering works.

If we render a normal web page on a browser, it will load all the content of the page together, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, with progressive rendering, developers need to split the code into smaller parts and render them incrementally, as described in the previous section.

During the first part of the rendering process, the website’s components, such as the title, body background, or the main interactive parts of the page, should be loaded. Afterward, the website should begin loading the CSS to style the components, so visitors can begin interacting with the web page.

Afterwards, we need to load the remaining HTML components along with the CSS and JavaScript to add the behavior to the code. Similarly, we should load JavaScript asynchronously.

Whenever we need to display https://coder-cafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/images or any content after downloading or fetching data from an API, we should display it last.

Different Techniques for Implementing Progressive Rendering

Now, we will learn different ways to implement progressive rendering on our website.

Lazy Loading

As the name suggests, it loads the content of a web page lazily. In the lazy loading technique, we load the content of the web page only when it is needed. For example, suppose you need to display 100 https://coder-cafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/images on a single web page. Initially, the user will only see the first 10 https://coder-cafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/images, and the user must scroll to see the remaining https://coder-cafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/images. In this case, we can load the first 10 https://coder-cafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/images initially and then load the remaining https://coder-cafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/images as the user scrolls.

This allows us to use lazy loading techniques to improve web page performance.

Prioritize Web Page Content

Another approach to progressive rendering is to prioritize essential content. For example, when loading a web page, we can display the interactive portion of the content first, then load the remaining content.

Also, we can initially render only the required CSS. For example, we might need to fetch data from an API and then render it. Therefore, if we render all of the CSS together, it will also render CSS for any data that wasn’t found, which we can render after fetching the data.

Thus, in this approach, we can initially display content with high priority and then display other content on the web page.

Why should developers use progressive rendering?

Here we explain some of the advantages of using progressive rendering.

Fast Web Page Loading Speed ​​

The main benefit of progressive rendering is that it increases the speed of web pages. It loads the content of the web page in chunks, so users can start interacting with the web page immediately when they open it.

Improved User Experience

Since progressive rendering increases the loading speed of the website, users can engage with the website more. It also increases the number of website visitors.

Improved Website SEO

Page speed is one of the important features in SEO. Google’s crawler traverses each page and evaluates the website’s content. If a page loads slowly, crawlers may skip it, and if it loads less than 1 second, it can rank the site higher than competitors.

Conclusion

Progressive rendering is a technique that improves web page performance by progressively rendering the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript content of a web page in smaller chunks or as needed. We also discussed two methods for implementing progressive rendering and the benefits of using it.