Have you ever noticed how your WordPress site runs slower? Especially when you’ve embedded some YouTube video? Yeah, that’s pretty common. Embedding videos, especially from YouTube, can significantly impact your site’s performance and page loading time. The good news is, you can make a few simple fixes right now to get your site speed back up to par without sacrificing those video embeds.
You built your site to share unique and engaging content with your readers, not frustrate them with slow-loading pages and buffering wheels. Follow these tips to optimize your WordPress site and keep your YouTube embeds from slowing down your site. Your readers will thank you, and your pageviews and time-on-site stats will exponentially increase. Let’s dive in!
Reasons for optimizing embedded YouTube videos in WordPress
Having YouTube videos embedded in your WordPress site is great for engagement, but if not optimized properly, they can really slow down your page loading times. Here are a few reasons why you need to optimize your YouTube embeds:
- YouTube videos contain a ton of data that has to load on your page. The more videos you have, the more data that has to load, and the slower your site becomes. To fix this, only embed videos when necessary and consider linking to YouTube instead.
- YouTube videos often have high resolution which requires more bandwidth and loading time. You can select a lower resolution in the YouTube embed code to speed things up.
- Your WordPress theme and plugins can also affect how fast YouTube embeds load. An optimized theme and disabling unnecessary plugins can help.
- Your WordPress server and hosting plan factor in too. More powerful servers and plans with solid state drives (SSDs) will load YouTube embeds much faster than basic shared hosting.
- YouTube uses resources from your server. When someone visits your page, your server has to retrieve the video data from YouTube and display the embed on your site. This requires processing power, bandwidth, and memory from your hosting server. If you have a lot of embeds or high traffic, it can overload your server.
- Viewers have to load the YouTube player. In addition to the video file itself, viewers have to load YouTube’s video player software to watch the embed. This additional JavaScript and other resources also slow down page loading.
- YouTube videos often autoplay. If you have videos set to autoplay on your page, it has to start loading and buffering the next video as soon as one ends, using up more resources. Turn off the autoplay feature to improve performance.
- YouTube embeds contain tracking codes. YouTube embeds come with extra code for tracking views, analytics, and advertising. All this extra code, even if not visible, adds to the total page load time.
By making a few adjustments to how you embed YouTube videos in your WordPress site, you can achieve a good balance of engaging content without sacrificing speed.
Tweaking resolutions, using minimal embed codes, optimizing your theme and plugins, upgrading your hosting, etc. can all help to create a faster loading experience for your viewers. With some experimenting, you’ll find what works best for your particular site.
Benefits of increasing the speed of your website
When your WordPress site takes too long to load, visitors get impatient and leave. By optimizing your site speed, pages will load faster and visitors will stay longer. This results in:
- Higher visitor satisfaction: No one likes waiting for slow-loading web pages. Faster load times lead to a better user experience and higher satisfaction.
- Improved SEO rankings: Google considers page speed as a factor in search rankings. Faster sites tend to rank higher in search results.
- Increased conversions: When pages load faster, visitors can find what they need quickly and are more likely to take action. This can mean more sales, signups, downloads, or other conversions for your site.
- Better bounce rates: Slow-loading pages often lead to higher bounce rates as visitors leave in frustration. Improving your speed will keep visitors engaged for longer.
How to Optimize YouTube Videos on WordPress?
You can ensure that your pages and videos load swiftly and effectively by using the ELEX Optimize YouTube Videos Embed Plugin for WordPress. Your website will have an advantage over competing ones in terms of page speed, which will increase client satisfaction.
The procedure is fairly straightforward; to begin, install and activate the plugin as you would any other plugin. The following techniques can be used to optimize the movie with or without a custom banner after activating the plugin.
To optimize and embed a YouTube video on your webpage, you can use the ELEX Optimize YouTube Videos Embed Plugin with two different methods.
Method 1: Optimizing with a custom banner
With Method 1, you can customize your embedded YouTube video with a custom banner. Simply go to the page where you want to embed the video and insert the shortcode provided below with the necessary details such as the video link, banner image URL, alternate text, and video dimensions:
[eh_optimize_youtube_embed video=”VIDEO LINK” banner=”IMAGE URL” alternate_text=”ALTERNATE TEXT” width=”560″ height=”315″]
Once you’ve customized the shortcode, you can insert it into your WordPress page and click Update. Your embedded YouTube video will appear with the custom banner you selected.
Method 2: Optimizing without a custom banner
With Method 2, you can embed a YouTube video without a custom banner. The process is similar to Method 1, but the shortcode is slightly different. You simply need to insert the shortcode below with the YouTube link in any of your WordPress pages and click Update. The video will appear with the default YouTube play button and no banner:
[eh_optimize_youtube_embed video=”https://youtu. e/KFvveeBVgyk”]
When you use either of these methods with the plugin, your YouTube video will appear without the inline frame and will increase the loading and response speed of your web pages.
Your web pages that contain YouTube videos will load and respond more quickly thanks to this plugin. The results of utilizing the ELEX Optimize YouTube Videos Embed Plugin are shown below before and after.
Conclusion
You’ve finished optimizing your WordPress site and getting those YouTube videos to load quickly. You may now embed as many YouTube videos as you like without fear of your site overloading.
Because your site’s performance is now A+, search engines will continue to index all of your material, but don’t relax too long because this is not a one-time procedure. WordPress and plugin updates are frequently released, so keep a lookout for future changes to keep your site always optimized.
We hope this post has helped you optimize your site loading time while embedding YouTube videos!
