YouTube Gallery Embed With Facade

The Facade Mode feature of our free YouTube WordPress plugin improves performance by loading a lighter version of the player, until it is clicked. As the channel-based YouTube gallery below illustrates, the feature also works on the player that sits atop of our standard gallery configuration. What you see before playback starts is the facade. Click on the facade or any of the gallery thumbnails, and the facade turns into a real YouTube player.

Now that you’ve played around with the gallery, try getting a Lighthouse or GTmetrix analysis on this page and you’ll see that there are no complaints about third-party resources.

YouTube Embed With Facade

Our free YouTube WordPress plugin supports a performant Facade Mode, which improves page speed by loading a lighter version of the YouTube player. Once the facade is clicked, the real player loads. We have tested this feature in multiple cases and found it to successfully improve your Lighthouse performance score by addressing the following recommendation: “Some third-party resources can be lazy loaded with a facade.”

You can see the feature at work on this very page. This site is running WordPress and our free YouTube plugin with facade mode activated — and there’s an embedded YouTube video below. Go ahead an load up Lighthouse and analyze this page with either (or both) tools. You’ll see that there are no complaints about third-party resources needing to be lazy loaded due to the facade mode being on.

YouTube player

If you watched the above video, you might have noticed that the plugin’s facade feature isn’t limited to pages with just a single embedded YouTube video like this one. The plugin automatically applies a facade on every YouTube embed on a page.

Now, it’s your turn to try our the feature on your own site, and hopefully you get similar results.