Make Your Page With an Embedded Youtube Video Load Fast:
As I have a bunch of clients whom I’m unable to talk into a Wistia subscription, and are stuck on embedding YouTube videos in their websites, I decided to build a little code generator for YouTube embeds that don’t make the page take days to load.
So, instead of using YouTube's ridiculous embed code, we load the video still image in the page, stick a "play" button overtop it, then make it clickable. When clicked, we swap out the still image for the iframe that embeds the YouTube video normally, and simulate a click on the video to start it playing.
And, we gen the schema.org/VideoObject markup for you (and let you tweak the name and description to tell Google what the video is about).
Test results: ordinary page with YouTube video embedded: 7.5 seconds; optimized: 3.5 seconds.
Paste your YouTube video link here: