Fix YouTube Videos Lagging/Stuttering/Buffering/Choppy Problems

Just imagine when you're watching a video or movie on YouTube, it plays and pauses every few seconds. It's a really frustrating and annoying experience that will make you crazy. Such YouTube videos lagging problem just takes you more times and definitely spoils your mood. Commonly, the questions will come to you later, "Why are YouTube videos lagging" or "My YouTube is Lagging and how to solve it?"

Q: I'm trying to watch some YouTube videos on my computer, but somehow my YouTube videos are becoming really jerky and choppy, even skipping and ending early as well as slowing down my browser (Google Chrome). When it is completely buffered and streamed, YouTube video lags literally every two seconds. Why do YouTube videos stutter?

Do you encounter similar lagging YouTube videos and want to know why YouTube lags on Chrome? Don't worry! To fix YouTube videos lagging playback issue, the following tricks will be helpful.

You can follow the technical method in part 1 to solve the YouTube video lagging issue temporarily. Alternatively, the second method makes it easy to fix YouTube video stuttering Chrome and other YouTube playback problems you may come across in the future. If you want to find a durable solution, you can move to Solution 2 directly.

1. Update Players to Latest Version

Although most of YouTube videos are played with HTML5 player, few YouTube videos need Adobe Flash Player, and some old PCs and browsers support Adobe Flash player only. So YouTube lagging in chrome issue is a common case. Therefore, you need to check if the browser you use supports HTML5 player by visiting: https://www.youtube.com/supported_browsers

Moreover, the old version of Adobe Flash would lead to videos lagging on browsers. So you can update Adobe Flash and find the latest version for YouTube lag fix here: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

Update: Since Adobe has ended support for Flash Player as of 2020, Flash content will no longer play back and be blocked in most browsers. Just keep your browser up-to-date to stream YouTube HTML5 videos.

2. Clear the Browsing Data and Update Browser

Many people like to use Google Chrome that worked well to play YouTube before, but one day some of you may find YouTube video lagging behind audio. Besides using other browsers to see if YouTube videos stuttering problems are gone, you can also try the following methods.

Option 1. An overloaded browser would cause YouTube videos lag. If you have opened too many tabs at one time, close them and play the videos again.

Option 2. If there are too many records that take up the room, which may lead to the lagging problem. So you'd better clear unnecessary cache, cookies and histories termly. To do it easily, you can enter this URL into the browser and then select the data you want to clear: chrome://settings/clearBrowserData

Option 3. Meanwhile, you can try to update the Chrome browser to fix YouTube lagging Chrome 2024/2023/2022... problem as well. So do other browsers.

3. Uninstall the add-ons causing choppy videos

Some extensions would slow down video buffering and even block YouTube videos. Find the extension, disable or uninstall it.

Tips: You need to uncheck the Enabled box of extension one by one and play YouTube videos to find the one causing YouTube playback issues.

4. Update Video Card Driver

If you have tried all the methods above, but still are completely troubled with "why is my YouTube lagging", you can check whether the PC video card driver is out of date or not. Update it to the latest version.