WP YouTube Lyte allows you to “lazy load” your video’s, by inserting responsive “Lite YouTube Embeds”. These look and feel like normal embedded YouTube, but only call the “fat” YouTube-player when clicked on, thereby reducing download size & rendering time substantially when embedding YouTube occasionally and improving page performance dramatically when you’ve got multiple YouTube video’s on one and the same page. The plugin can be configured to cache YouTube thumbnails locally, improving both performance and privacy. As such LYTE embedded YouTube videos do not require requests to the YouTube servers, probably (I am not a lawyer) allowing for better GDPR-compliance.

The plugin picks up on normal YouTube links, taking over from WordPress core’s oEmbed. Alternatively you can add a YouTube-link for a video or an entire playlist with “httpv” instead of “http(s)” or add a Lyte widget to your sidebar and WP YouTube Lyte replaces that link with the correct performance-optimized code. Some examples:

• httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY (normal video embed)
• httpv://youtu.be/_SQkWbRublY (video embed with youtube-shortlink)
• httpa://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY (audio only embed)
• httpv://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA486E741B25F8E00 (playlist embed)
• httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY#stepSize=-1 (video player, one size smaller than what’s configured as default)
• httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY?start=20&showinfo=0 (video player, start playing at 20 seconds and don’t show title)

Or using shortcodes:

 [lyte id='_SQkWbRublY' /]
 [lyte id='_SQkWbRublY' audio='true' /]
 [lyte id='A486E741B25F8E00' playlist='true' /]

WP YouTube Lyte has been written with optimal performance as primary goal, but has been tested for maximum browser-compatibility (iPad included) while keeping an eye on accessibility. Starting with version 1.2.0 lyte embeds are fully responsive and can automatically embed videoObject microdata as well. The plugin is fully multi-language, with support for Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Romanian, Spanish and Slovene.

Feedback is welcome; see info in the faq for bug reports/ feature requests and feel free to rate and/or report on compatibility on wordpress.org.