Placing videos directly on a website can eat up tons of megabytes in WordPress memory storage – which can significantly slow down page load speeds.

That’s why we embed videos – to keep most of the memory storage at the original site.

In YouTube, standard embedding is done by clicking the video’s “Share”, and then “Embed” to get the “IFRAME” snippet to copy and paste in the “Text” section of our website post.

The example I’m using in this training post is the first song found in the Vegetable Songs post on my gardening website. Here is the YouTube URL for the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE5tvaveVak

Keep in mind that the "Video ID" for this video is "RE5tvaveVak"...

Now, if there are only one or two YouTube videos embedded on the webpage, there’s not a noticeable difference in page load speed.

But, did you know that each and every video embedded on a webpage adds 500 kilobytes of memory storage with all the extra JavaScript files needed to support the video?

Did you also know that the browsers, used by visitors, have to make 4 requests to render every embedded video – 1 for the video cover image – and, 3 for different resolutions of the video?

Well, the chicken came home to roost when I recently uploaded my Vegetable Songs post. I embedded 39 YouTube song videos and my page load speed almost came to a grinding halt! The unusual number of embedded videos jammed up my WordPress website – taking up almost 20 megabytes of storage space – and creating a nightmare in which the page kept loading – and loading – and loading…

I felt like I had on a pair of pants that were 2 sizes too small! I couldn’t move!

What to do? I didn’t want to remove this webpage. I put a lot of work into it – and captured a lot of great veggie songs – for all ages!

Proceed – and you’ll see what I did to fix it!