Performance-wise, is it better to enqueue a (small) script on every page or test to see if it’s needed?

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I’m using the FitVids.js script to make YouTube video embeds work with a responsive layout. The script is < 3kb, but only about half of my pages actually have YouTube embeds.

In terms of total load-time for a page that doesn’t contain a YouTube video, is it more costly to do a strpos() on the content or to include the script regardless?

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I imagine this has a lot to do with the end-user’s connection speed vs. the server’s resources, and honestly, it’s a low-traffic site with undemanding users so it really doesn’t matter… I’m mostly asking because I don’t have a good grasp of performance optimization and I want to learn.

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  1. What happens on the user’s side is off topic as @bungeshea said already. Once the user has loaded the file it will stay in the browser cache for a while, so you don’t have to worry about double loaded files anyway.

    But let’s look at the server side and how WordPress handles this.

    If you want to load a script on every page you just hook into wp_enqueue_scripts:

    add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'load_fitvid' );

function load_fitvid()
{
    wp_register_script( 'fitvid', plugins_url('/fitvid.js', __FILE__) );
    wp_enqueue_script( 'fitvid' );
}

    Dead simple.

    If you want to load the script only if there is a YouTube video, you have to hook into the_content, search for URLs with a host name youtube.com or youtu.be, check if WP_Embed::autoembed is activated (this converts URLs into embeds) and load the script if all these conditionals evaluate to TRUE.

    This is slower. It is not very safe too: the default handler for videos might be overridden and run later than your content parser.

    So: yes, there is a difference. I would use the simple method in your situation. If just 1% of all posts had a video … well this would be a different situation. I would hook into save_post then and update a custom meta value load_fitvid. On the front-end I’d test that value (much faster) and load the script then. But this is rather difficult to implement with existing posts.