Lazy Embed

Videos are one of the largest assets that can be loaded on a webpage, and as such are one of the largest contributors to slow performance and high carbon emissions.

In fact, adding a Youtube embed to a page using the latest default WordPress theme, increased the page transfer size from 21 kb to 973 kb, and loaded an additional 27 resources. That’s an increase in transfer size of 4533%. Adding a Vimeo video increased the transfer from 21 kb to 276 kb, an increase in transfer size of 1214%, and loaded an additional 7 resources.

The Lazy Embed plugin defers the loading of any resource required for playing the video until the video is requested to be played. It does this by adding a srcdoc attribute to the iframe which shows in place of the normal iframe content.

Currently the following third parties are supported

• Youtube
• Vimeo
• Dailymotion