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.
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.
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.