How to Lazy Load YouTube Videos and Reduce Website Load Time
As a website owner or developer, you may have encountered the issue of videos, particularly YouTube videos, slowing down your website's performance. When a user visits a page with an embedded YouTube video, the video player and all its assets are loaded, even if the user doesn't immediately watch the video. This can have a significant impact on your website's load time, leading to a poor user experience and potentially affecting your search engine rankings.
Fortunately, there's a solution to this problem: lazy loading. Lazy loading is a technique that delays the loading of content until it's needed, which can greatly improve a website's performance. In this article, we'll explore how you can lazy load YouTube videos on your website and prevent them from automatically loading, thus reducing your website's load time.
The Solution: Lazy Load YouTube Videos
To address these issues, you can implement a technique called "lazy loading" for your YouTube videos. Lazy loading involves delaying the loading of content until it's actually needed, such as when the user scrolls to the video or clicks on a play button.
Here's a simple method to lazy load YouTube videos on your website:
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Upload the Video to YouTube: Instead of hosting the video directly on your website, upload the video to YouTube. This will reduce the number of resources your website needs to load initially.
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Create a Placeholder Image: Replace the embedded YouTube video with a placeholder image, typically a thumbnail of the video. This image will be the only content loaded initially, reducing the initial load time.
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Add a Play Button: Add a play button overlay on the placeholder image to indicate to the user that the content is a video.
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Implement the Lazy Loading Script: When the user clicks the play button, use a JavaScript script to replace the placeholder image with the actual YouTube video player. This way, the video player and its assets are only loaded when the user interacts with the content.
Here's an example of the JavaScript code you can use to implement lazy loading for YouTube videos:
(function($){
var youtube = document.querySelectorAll( ".youtubez" );
for (var i = 0; i < youtube.length; i++) {
youtube[i].addEventListener( "click", function() {
var iframe = document.createElement( "iframe" );
iframe.setAttribute( "frameborder", "0" );
iframe.setAttribute( "allowfullscreen", "" );
iframe.setAttribute( "src", "https://www.youtube.com/embed/"+ this.dataset.embed +"?rel=0&showinfo=0&autoplay=1" );
this.innerHTML = "";
this.appendChild( iframe );
} );
};
})(jQuery);
This script selects all the elements with the class "youtubez" on the page, which represent the YouTube video placeholders. When the user clicks on one of these placeholders, the script replaces the placeholder with the actual YouTube video player, loading the video only when the user interacts with the content.
Here's the accompanying CSS to style the YouTube video placeholders:
/* Lazy load youtube videos */
.youtubez{
background-color:#000;
margin-top:8px;
position:relative;
padding-top:56.25%;
overflow:hidden;
cursor:pointer
}
.youtubez img{
width:100%;
top:-16.82%;
left:0;
opacity:.7
}
.youtubez .play-button{
width:90px;
height:60px;
background-color:#333;
box-shadow:0 0 30px rgba(0,0,0,0.6);
z-index:1;
opacity:.8;
border-radius:6px
}
.youtubez .play-button:before{
content:"";
border-style:solid;
border-width:15px 0 15px 26px;
border-color:transparent transparent transparent #fff
}
.youtubez img,.youtubez .play-button{
cursor:pointer
}
.youtubez img,.youtubez iframe,.youtubez .play-button,.youtubez .play-button:before{
position:absolute
}
.youtubez .play-button,.youtubez .play-button:before{
top:50%;
left:50%;
transform:translate3d(-50%,-50%,0)
}
.youtubez iframe{
height:100%;
width:100%;
top:0;
left:0
}
This CSS styles the YouTube video placeholders, including the placeholder image, the play button overlay, and the responsive layout of the video player.
Conclusion
Lazy loading YouTube videos is an effective way to improve your website's performance and user experience. By replacing the embedded YouTube player with a placeholder image and only loading the full video player when the user interacts with the content, you can significantly reduce your website's load time and bandwidth usage.
This technique can be particularly beneficial for websites with multiple embedded YouTube videos, where the cumulative impact of automatically loading all the video players can be detrimental to the overall site performance.
By implementing lazy loading for your YouTube videos, you can ensure that your website loads quickly, provides an excellent user experience, and maintains a strong presence in search engine rankings. Flowpoint.ai can help you identify all the technical errors that are impacting conversion rates on your website and directly generate recommendations to fix them, including suggestions for lazy loading YouTube videos.