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Chapter 3: Videos

Beautiful But Tricky

Videos are a fantastic way to catch attention on your website, showcase your products, and get people to care. The only problem is, videos take a lot of bandwidth, and if you don’t add them correctly, they can tank your site speed.

Step 1: External Video Players

Avoid hosting the video directly on your website whenever possible. Use an external video player, such as YouTube or Vimeo to host all your videos, then embed them from there.

External Video Players

Vimeo

YouTube

If You Must Upload A Video Directly To Your Site…

There may be a situation in which you need to upload a video directly to your website instead of using an external player. In that case, there are some steps you can take to help mitigate the damage to your website load time.

Step 1: Convert Formats

Like with images, different video file types are better for the web than others. HTML5 supported formats such as MP4 and WebM are the best formats to upload your video in.

Tools For Converting Video Formats

Step 2: Use Data Compression Tools

Just like compressing images, you can also compress videos. Be careful not to compress them too far. Grainy videos will do more harm than not having any videos at all.

Tools For Compressing Videos

Optional Additional Steps

Remove Audio From Videos: Not always an option, but if it’s a background video that isn’t going to have any noise, then you’ll need to remove any audio data the video has.

Use A CDN: This is covered in later chapters.

Now that you have your videos set straight, let's go on to another huge problem, plugins.