How do you balance site speed with rich media like videos?

[ProjectLabs]

Google says to make your pages as useful as possible, but it considers site speed into its ranking algorithm. How do you balance adding rich media like embedding useful YouTube videos with keeping your page load times low?

[NakulGoyal]

Youtube videos do not contribute towards your page-load speed. Also, site-speed is one of the hundreds of SE factors and I would worry about the rest of the stuff before I get too concerned about site-speed. I would also be concerned if my site is in the lower side or even close to the average site speed.

How old/established is this site ? Is this an authority site ?

[PhilNottingham]

Hey,

So I wouldn't worry too much about the consequence of videos on page speed. The only instance it's going to cause problems is if you embed a large quality of flash content on a single page.

Youtube videos wont cause much issue at all because they are typically embedded using an iframe.

I wouldn't worry about filling pages with rich media too much, it's a good thing to do and wont cause load speed issues unless you have tons of enormous images and hundreds of videos on each page. Use HTML5 players or iframes rather than flash for video and ensure that your code is lean and not pulling in unnecessary files from the server. The most common contributor to page loading times is poor code, particularly badly written javascript.

Cheers,

Phil