Balancing Rich Media with Performance

Although interesting in the form of video content, it has a price: the speed of loading pages. To the reader of a blog and the visitor of a website, loading an unrewarding page slowly is frustrating, may cause higher bounce rates, and may eventually lead to a loss of traffic/pageviews, or activity. That said, when you add video to a long article, including a comparison of YouTube Shorts and long-form videos, it is important to balance between rich media and performance.

YouTube has short-form videos and long-form videos with easy ability to embed; however, each embedded video adds external requests, scripts, and renders. The page may become sluggish when several videos are embedded without optimization, particularly for mobile users on slow networks. Fortunately, there are ways to make your page lean and still enjoy the benefits of the visuals and convey the beauty of a story with the help of video.

Use Lazy Loading for Embedded Videos

Lazy loading is one of the best methods that can be used to enhance performance. In this approach, the video is not loaded until one hhe needs to scroll to the video location. Lazy-loading makes sure that the visible contents of your page are loaded first and leaves the video player to associate when an urge calls.

Lazy loading is now natively supported on most modern browsers using a single HTML attribute. In a case where you need to add a YouTube embed, you can insert loading = lazy in <iframe> tags. This one line will save you a lot of page weight without altering the video behavior used by a user.

For example:

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<iframe 

  loading “lazy”

  width=”560″ 

  height “315” 

  src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID” 

  frameborder=”0″ 

  allowfullscreen>

</iframe>

A small, but very effective improvement that you can implement quickly on all your embedded videos is to use lazy loading.

Replace Embeds with Clickable Thumbnails

One more tip to apply is substituting massive video players with thumbnail pictures to save the browser load. Instead of incorporating several YouTube iframes into the page, you can show a fixed thumbnail picture resembling a video player. When the visitor clicks on the image, the real video loads.

This approach will minimize the number of HTTP requests as a page is opened and does not load the YouTube player scripts till needed. YouTube has the convenience of offering preview thumbnails of each video at URL addresses such as:

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https://img.youtube.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/hqdefault.jpg

Under this method, you will be able to cover the picture with a container that loads a video upon click through JavaScript. Still, the viewer has a nice, uninterrupted experience, and your page escapes from the performance overhead of having multiple embedded media players.

Limit the Number of Videos Per Page

One can be eager to incorporate all related videos that one can find to provide context, but such a strategy is usually ineffective not only in terms of performance but also the clarity of presentation. Every YouTube embedding will make the page heavier: it will load outside scripts and styles as well as the content of an iframe. This can easily translate into money when compared to the number of short-form and long-form videos you embed in the same article.

You should not put all the videos on the page, but focus on the one or two most important videos that should be incorporated directly into the article. To have more content, have text links that can be opened in another tab. Such an approach will keep the reader occupied on your site and economy on overheads.

For instance:

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<p>Watch our full breakdown of Shorts vs. long-form here: 

<a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>View on YouTube</a></p>

This subtle change improves loading performance while still guiding interested viewers to supplemental content.

Optimize Embeds with Lightweight Plugins (WordPress)

In case you have your site running WordPress or any other content management system, it is worth mentioning that there are some pretty good YouTube embedding plugins that will get the job done effectively. These tools serve as alternatives to bulky default embeds and are optimized.

The most popular ones include:

WP YouTube Lyte Plugin- This is a plugin that only loads a preview that can be clicked on until the viewer starts to play. It also destroys the loading of the YouTube script until interactivity.

Lightweight YouTube Embed – A lightweight plugin that does not load the iframe and all external JavaScripts until the user clicks to play.

Just as the name implies, these tools offer nice interfaces that make your job to optimize performance easy at the back end. If you are a content creator who works with video quite often, these plugins will be a lifesaver when keeping your pages quick and responsive.