Speed matters: re-evaluating WP YouTube Lyte’s performance

So stupid me made a (smallish) mistake when working on 1.1.0, which caused WP YouTube Lyte (rapidly approaching 80.000 downloads, thanks guys & girls) to load immediately instead of waiting for the “document loaded” event (lazy loading). That got fixed in 1.1.2 (which also loads the CSS differently, resulting in 1 file less to request), but the mistake did get me to re-investigate performance.
Exactly how fast is WP YouTube Lyte nowadays? I fired up some webpagetest.org IE9-instances in the Amsterdam node to compare this WP YouTube Lyte powered post on my test-blog with an identical blogpost with default YouTube embedded video. These are the jury’s results for the fastest of 10 runs in both cases (click on the image to actually see the details):

The main figures to compare (normal YouTube embed vs WP YouTube Lyte):

  • time till document complete: 1.612s vs 1.047s
  • time till fully loaded: 4.358s vs 1.385s
  • total number of requests: 13 vs 9
  • combined size of requests: 446 KB vs 77 KB

So using WP YouTube Lyte instead of normal YouTube embeds results in less files to download, less data to transport, the page being ready for interaction quicker and having everything loaded a whole lot faster. These figures are for a single YouTube on a page, but the impact is all the more important if you have multiple video’s on one page (e.g. a category or tag-page for “music” or “videos”) off course.
The full comparison based on 10 tests on both pages:

YouTube embed (full results)Lite YouTube Embed (full results)
doc completefully loadeddoc completefully loaded
min:1612380810471385
median:1918463111911524
max:3221511020782881

So there you go. When in doubt, check these stats and then go install WP YouTube Lyte, because after all speed matters!