Although it has been a few months since I last wrote about my baby WordPress plugin, time did not stand still between version 0.3.0 and 0.5.2; the player size can now be changed in the options-screen, I’ve replaced my newTube html5-hack with Google’s official (yet experimental) new html5-compatible embed code and I started migrating the CSS from the mess that had become the JavaScript-file. And I almost forgot what may be the most important change; I started searching for blogs that use WP-YouTube-Lyte to see how it behaves in the wild. Some of the bugs I discovered that way;
- WordPress has a lousy “the_excerpt”-function which removes script-tags but not the script itself, which caused my JavaScript to be displayed as normal text in excerpts (typically in category-pages). Fixed with some unpleasant CDATA-tinkering.
- Some blogs allow crawlers to see the contents of a directory if no index.* is in place, so e.g. options.php gets indexed with an ugly (but logical) error-message. Fixed with an index.html.
- There’s a lot of themes and some of those have CSS that impacts the way WP YouTube Lyte is displayed. Most issues should be fixed by better CSS for my plugin, but do let me know if you encounter more weird display-problems (especially the controls that are incorrectly positioned).
But with all those changes you might start to wonder if WP-YouTube-Lyte still reduces download size & rendering time substantially, no? So I ran a couple of new tests for this page on my blog (it has 3 embedded YouTube’s) on webpagetest.org (settings: 5 runs on IE7 via Amsterdam, excluding requests to stats.wordpress.com). The difference is … well, judge for yourself (or see below the tables for the summary)
With normal Flash-based embeds (full results here):
| Document Complete | Fully Loaded | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Load Time | First Byte | Start Render | Time | Requests | Bytes In | Time | Requests | Bytes In | |
| First View | 1.850s | 0.634s | 1.330s | 1.850s | 15 | 343 KB | 5.350s | 22 | 524 KB |
| Repeat View | 1.142s | 0.346s | 0.497s | 1.142s | 5 | 17 KB | 2.455s | 5 | 17 KB |
And with WP YouTube Lyte (full results here):
| Document Complete | Fully Loaded | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Load Time | First Byte | Start Render | Time | Requests | Bytes In | Time | Requests | Bytes In | |
| First View | 1.201s | 0.355s | 0.974s | 1.201s | 10 | 55 KB | 2.065s | 20 | 103 KB |
| Repeat View | 0.605s | 0.352s | 0.473s | 0.605s | 2 | 12 KB | 1.447s | 5 | 14 KB |
Did you see that? Less requests, less data and faster rendering for first and repeat views. Hurray for WP-YouTube-Lyte! But enough with that ego-tripping already, I’ve got an Opera-bug to look into! Or wait, I’ll watch this great new Pomplamoose+Ben Folds+Nick Hornby videosong first:
