Lightweight and Responsive Youtube Embed vs WP YouTube Lyte

If you are embedding Youtube video(s) into your site then you will need this plugin. As you may (or may not) know the default Youtube embed code is not responsive and in order to load the player itself your browser has to download more than 1MB of data from Youtube’s servers. That is way too much and this is the reason why we made this plugin. A video player has to be lightweight and responsive. Period. This plugin is replacing the default Youtube player with the video’s high quality thumbnail and a play button. The real player and the video won’t load until you click on the play button or the thumbnail itself. With this easy trick you will have a much lighter and faster website and the thumbnail + the actual player will be responsive too. Our plugin is only 60KB without any extra library or unnecessary function. If you are speed-optimizing your site or if you want to reduce the loading times of your pages then you are at the right place. This plugin will: Make all of the embedded Youtube videos responsive automatically Will reduce the size of your pages (where you have embedded videos) Will make your site faster Will improve the user experience You can also: Manually insert a different thumbnail for each embedded video with the ‘thumb_url’ parameter. [youtube_embed url=”video_url” thumb-url=”custom_thumb_url”] Manually set a different width for each video with the ‘width’ parameter. [youtube_embed url=”video_url” width=”50″] Manually align each video to left, right or center with the ‘align’ parameter. [youtube_embed url=”video_url” align=”center”] Disable the related videos Disable the video controls Disable the fullscreen option Align the videos globally or individually Set the custom video width for all videos or to just a single video with a shortcode parameter Comparison Here’s a quick comparison with the built-in TwentySeventeen theme (without any other plugin). We placed a default Youtube video embed code in a new and empty page, ran the tests and then replaced it with our solution before running the tests again. Total page size with the traditional Youtube embed code: 2.18MB Total page size with our lightweight & responsive embedder: 472KB Page load time with the traditional Youtube embed code: 5.33s Page load time with our lightweight & responsive embedder: 2.52s

WP YouTube Lyte allows you to “lazy load” your video’s, by inserting responsive “Lite YouTube Embeds”. These look and feel like normal embedded YouTube, but only call the “fat” YouTube-player when clicked on, thereby reducing download size & rendering time substantially when embedding YouTube occasionally and improving page performance dramatically when you’ve got multiple YouTube video’s on one and the same page. The plugin can be configured to cache YouTube thumbnails locally, improving both performance and privacy. As such LYTE embedded YouTube videos do not require requests to the YouTube servers, probably (I am not a lawyer) allowing for better GDPR-compliance. The plugin picks up on normal YouTube links, taking over from WordPress core’s oEmbed. Alternatively you can add a YouTube-link for a video or an entire playlist with “httpv” instead of “http(s)” or add a Lyte widget to your sidebar and WP YouTube Lyte replaces that link with the correct performance-optimized code. Some examples: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY (normal video embed) httpv://youtu.be/_SQkWbRublY (video embed with youtube-shortlink) httpa://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY (audio only embed) httpv://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA486E741B25F8E00 (playlist embed) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY#stepSize=-1 (video player, one size smaller than what’s configured as default) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY?start=20&showinfo=0 (video player, start playing at 20 seconds and don’t show title) Or using shortcodes: [lyte id='_SQkWbRublY' /] [lyte id='_SQkWbRublY' audio='true' /] [lyte id='A486E741B25F8E00' playlist='true' /] WP YouTube Lyte has been written with optimal performance as primary goal, but has been tested for maximum browser-compatibility (iPad included) while keeping an eye on accessibility. Starting with version 1.2.0 lyte embeds are fully responsive and can automatically embed videoObject microdata as well. The plugin is fully multi-language, with support for Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Romanian, Spanish and Slovene. Feedback is welcome; see info in the faq for bug reports/ feature requests and feel free to rate and/or report on compatibility on wordpress.org.