I always accepted this, but I discovered that there is a great Plugin that changes how Youtube videos and handled by the server and it doesn’t affect the viewer. It is called WP Youtubte Lyte.

Here is how it works. You install it and it changes how the server deals with displaying the youtube video. In a normal WordPress instance it has to wait for Youtube to respond, and Youtube doesn’t respond quickly. So this slows down your webpage. Now instead of loading the video at the start, it waits until the end. The end result is that the user sees the video faster because the page can display and the extra time it takes youtube to respond makes it appear faster.

When you have a website, Google ranks it partly based on its speed. I have worked very hard in having fast websites. I test themes, plugins, and everything I can do to make the site fast. Since I do this, people notice. I had one developer contact me and want to work with me because I had a fast site. You never know what people are looking for, so you should always try to know as much as possible about everything you can.

My site without this plugin takes on average 1.5 seconds. It is a pretty cheap hosting package and I am thrilled with that performance. However when I installed this WP Youtube Lyte plugin I gasped when I did a speed test. It dropped by half to .9 seconds! It put my site to 99% in pagerank and I was thrilled. It uses a principle called lazy loading and/or deferred Javascript and it really works great. If you use GTMetrix and it says you have to defer your javascript this is the plugin you want to use.

I tried dozens of plugins to defer javascript. They were complex and didn’t work. In addition, A2hosting that I use has its own performance/cache management plugin. So you can’t just install any plugin. I love this plugin and plan to support the author.