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!
| document complete | fully loaded | video only | ||||||
| time (s) | requests | size (KB) | time (s) | requests | size (KB) | requests | size (KB) | |
| Standard YouTube (page | result) | 1.757 | 10 | 167 | 4.718 | 13 | 483 | 8 | 429.8 |
| WP YouTube Lyte (page | result) | 1.021 | 6 | 79 | 1.353 | 8 | 100 | 3 | 22.9 |
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?
