I would like to figure out a way to place videos on a home page, and avoid the burden of preloading You-Tube videos. The page has five videos. The goal is to speed up the loading of the page. I imagine that if there is no video loading until the user clicks a link, the page should load more quickly. I made some inquiries on the X-theme Facebook group, and got some replies that gave me hope. One suggested using Essential Grid as the intervening technology. Since it comes with X-theme, and I use it on my home page, I decided to try it. It made no difference, and I could not get it to display custom splash graphics I had made so that the video’s YouTube image came up no matter what I did. And reviewing the page-load info via Gtmetrix.com I saw no improvement.
My question has both a general and potentially a specific form. Is there any way to reduce page-load time by using intervening plug-ins to turn a “video” into a passive graphic link? Is there a way to do that with Essential Grid? Or is my quest a folly?
Thanks