When YouTube videos are embedded on your website using standard IFRAME tags, the web page has to download around 0.5 MB of Images, CSS and Javascript for rendering the YouTube video player in the IFRAME and the files are downloaded even if a visitor on your website hasn't watched the embedded YouTube video. Not to mention that it takes multiple HTTP requests to render the Youtube video player.

The standard embed code for YouTube videos is making your load time slow and this affects your page speed score. The standard embed code is also not mobile responsive. Users who are on mobile experience a video player that doesn't resize itself accordingly.

For Google+, Google's engineers came up with a workaround to reduce load time of Youtube videos and what we're doing with Art Fast Youtube is using a similar apporach. What we do to speed up the page load and make the videos responsive is to load a thumbnail from Youtube's API and we place the thumbnail image in the page with a play button placed over the video. When the video is clicked it loads and plays the Youtube video. The key part here is that we're not loading Youtube video resources unless a user wants to watch the video.