If you care about performance, privacy, and user experience, this block is for you.
This plugin enhances the default YouTube and Vimeo blocks—including any existing blocks—and changes their behavior to only load the video thumbnail until a visitor chooses to play the video.
Features
- Load YouTube videos faster (uses the
lite-youtubecustom-element) - Load Vimeo videos faster (uses the
lite-viemocustom-element) - Loads YouTube videos from nocookie.youtube.com for enhanced privacy
- Works without JavaScript (shows link to video instead in a player-like design)
- No plugin lock-in! Automatically improves the core Embed block. Turn the plugin off and the behavior goes back to the WordPress default.
Want more features?
I’m considering building a PRO version with the potential following features:
- Options to set a custom start and end time
- Custom thumbnail images for videos
- Custom aspect ratios for videos
- Support for YouTube shorts
- Control whether to load video from nocookie.youtube.com or not
- Adjust the image quality of the thumbnail
- Support for playlists, not just single videos
- Full support for all YouTube query parameters (https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters)
- Classic Editor / [embed] shortcode support
If enough people express interest, I’ll build it! Let me know if you’re interested!
Contribute on Github
Enhanced Embed Block is on Github for pull requests and bug reports.
Software
This plugin uses the lite-youtube custom-element under the MIT license. Thank you to Paul Irish and Justin Ribiero for their work on that project.
This plugin uses the lite-vimeo custom-element under the MIT license. Thank you to Chris Shaw for their work on that project.