Need to embed YouTube videos on your website? Did you know this has potential implications for GDPR? Did you know they can slow your website down? This little plugin fixes all that!
How do I find the WP YouTube Lyte plugin?
As per usual you can find this in the WordPress Plugins Directory and it’s completely free. Before you configure this plugin please make sure you’ve read the important accompanying information on this page. Here’s what to look for:
Why do I need this plugin?
If you copy and paste the URL of a YouTube video in to a WordPress article it will automatically be embedded on your website. In other words you can play the video directly within your web page. This is great BUT sadly it comes at a cost.
Firstly, the default embedded YouTube player adds an overhead to your website that can slow things down a fair bit, especially if you have a lot of videos on your site. More importantly it has implications for GDPR and if you’re trying to run a cookie-free site (without annoying cookie warnings) then embedding YouTube videos will scupper your plans.
Thankfully Frank Goossens put this lovely little plugin together. It makes use of the YouTube API to embed videos without all the usual gubbins planted on your site by YouTube.
How to configure the YouTube Lyte plugin
Obviously feel free to use whatever settings you like for this plugin but here’s how I configure it by default. You’ll need to get a YouTube API for this. I’ll not explain how to do this but there’s a link within the plugin explaining what to do:
I like to add some default wording under each video pointing the viewer to my Privacy Policy. I then include some text in my Privacy Policy explaining a bit more about embedded content. I have no idea if this will suffice for GDPR purposes but it’s way above and beyond what most websites do.
What if the YouTube API stops working?
The plugin very cleverly caches the information it needs from YouTube – in other words it stores a local copy on your website (hidden away). The only downside of this is that after a while it’s cached so much information it doesn’t really need the API anymore. As a result YouTube’s API service can sometimes stop working since it thinks you’re not using it. To resolve this you might want to periodically Empty WP YouTube Lyte’s cache.
If you spot any errors in this article please get in touch. Don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube and please join my mailing list.
Last Updated on 24 November 2020 by Andy Mac