Embed YouTube videos better in WordPress

YouTube is one of the most popular forms of media display on the Internet, it is a huge library of videos where you can embed your videos. These videos can also be displayed on your website by embedding the YouTube videos on your website. The default method is to embed them in a normal iframe. However, this can cause significant loading times on a given page. In WordPress, there is a simple plug-in that allows you to load the YouTube videos "lazy", that is, only when they are actually needed. This can significantly reduce the loading time of your website, especially on mobile networks. That's why in this blog post we're going to take a look at the Lazy Load for Videos plugin. This allows you to replace the default YouTube-iframes with a placeholder until they are actually clicked. Let's get started!

Lazy Load, what is it exactly?

You may have heard of "lazy loading" before, as many speed testing and optimization tools have a separate feature to control this for images. Large images can take longer to load, especially on mobile networks in remote areas. Since some versions, WordPress now automatically chooses to load all images with lazy loading. This means that no plug-in or additional code is needed to make your images load sluggishly. Unfortunately, this is not yet possible for YouTube videos without a plug-in. So let's hope that this will be possible for videos in the future.

Lazy loading ensures that an image or source is only loaded when it is needed, and that anything below or above the "fold" is not loaded immediately on the first request. Anything below or above the "fold" will not load immediately on the first request, but will load in the background as it appears on the screen. This is a smart technology that you can use to ensure that your website loads faster overall. This way, it is more likely to rank in the higher positions in Google and visitors can have a better user experience. This, in turn, can lead to a conversion or other positive outcome.

Slow loading videos in WordPress

To be able to load videos with a delay, it is necessary to install a plug-in. There are, as for many other purposes within WordPress, a variety of plug-ins that can be used for this purpose. However, the version discussed here goes a step further and adds a placeholder for each YouTube video. This means that the entire iframe of YouTube is replaced with an image. And when visitors press the play button in the middle of the image, the iframe is loaded.

This can ensure that you get a speed boost on pages with a normal YouTube video. And it can also provide a better user experience. All you have to do is press the play button, just like you would otherwise.

Once you install the plug-in, you also have the ability to go back in your previous posts and pages, so you don't have to go back manually to adjust all this in previous posts. That's good for most purposes. So if you want to have a better chance of getting better results on Google, make sure your website is fast!

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