The latest WP YouTube Lyte version came with support for responsive themes and added microdata for better search-engine discovery of your embedded video’s. But there were also some important improvements from a performance point of view;

• The title of the video (and the description, length, …) is now requested and cached server-side (the data is stored in the WordPress database, as post_meta, to be precise) and included in the HTML instead of getting that data client-side using JavaScript
• The LYTE player chrome (the play button -with 2 states- and the bottom control) is now fetched with one request for a CSS sprite (lytesprite.png) instead of 2 separate images
• And finally a lot of the player properties are now defined in CSS instead of being dynamically set in JavaScript, resulting a a significantly smaller JavaScript-file

But what are words worth, you only want to know if WP YouTube Lyte still out-performs normal YouTube embeds, right? Well, there’s nothing like a nice old-fashioned comparative webpagetest;org test to see where we stand!

So yeah, WP YouTube Lyte is more efficient then normal YouTube embeds, by a very large margin! Now go and preach to the unfaithful, because after all, doesn’t the world deserve Lyter YouTube embeds?