Adding videos to your landing page can increase conversions by as much as 80%. Users tend to spend more time on your website if it contains a video.

However, what would be the outcome if the video doesn’t load quickly? Most likely, users will leave your site without checking out what’s in store for them. That’s never a good thing. Because once you get visitors to visit your site, you definitely want them to stay a while.

The truth is, a slow loading video with decrease your overall page load time.

Read on to learn how to optimize video loading speed for your website and why it’s important.

So, how do you optimize video loading speed on your website?

Why You Should Optimize Videos

If you want to provide engaging content for your site visitors, you’ll need to offer multimedia content. But the inclusion of video content has increased the average size of a web page to more than 3mb.

In previous years, video content increased web pages from 204kb to more than 700kb. None of these page size increases are ideal. Therefore, all of these changes have made video optimization a must for websites.

Best Video Formats For Websites

When adding videos to your website, aim for formats that will allow you to pack quality videos into small files. Two formats that meet this requirement are MP4 and WebM. These are the most frequently used formats on top video streaming platforms. While WebM is currently only supported by Firefox and Chrome, MP4 videos work perfectly on all browsers.

How To Optimize Video Loading Speed For Your Website

To optimize video loading speed for your website requires you to accomplish two tasks:

1. Optimizing video files to ensure it has little to no effect on the web page loading speed.
2. Enhancing the web page for embedding and displaying video content.

Here’s how to complete the two-step process:

1. How To Optimize Video Files

Make the video files smaller:
Obviously, media files that are smaller in size tend to load faster. You can reduce the size of your video files using data compression tools. Look for tools that can do the job without effecting the image quality of the videos. If you choose the wrong tool, you might be left with something that resembles an animated GIF. And such videos will do more harm to your site than good.

Use formats supported by HTML5:
HTML5 allows video creators to create video content without the use of plugins. So, what happens if your video format is not supported by HTML5? Well, you’ll need to use a video converter and convert your existing video files into an HTML5 format. Again, popular HTML5 formats include MP4 and WebM.

Remove the audio data:
Removing the audio data will also reduce the video size even more. However, this trick will only be useful if you don’t require audio for your video. If a muted video is what you’re aiming for, you can eliminate the audio data when exporting the files. You can also use a regular video editing tool to remove audio data.

Use a CDN:
CDN (content delivery network) is a system consisting of multiple servers. These servers store cached copies of your website’s static content. In addition to ensuring supreme redundancy, CDNs enable prompt content delivery. They make this possible by sourcing content from the nearest servers.

A CDN is essential for efficiently managing large files like videos. With a CDN in action, your users will not have to wait several minutes for the video to buffer and download.

2. Optimizing Web Pages For Videos

Stop your video from loading until the web page loads completely
It’s best not to have the video set to play at the same time as the page loads. If you do, this can sometimes reduce the video loading speed even more.

Therefore, if you want videos to load quickly, defer them from loading until after the page completely loads. This will boost the video performance and user experience.

Mention the video size:
In your CSS or HTML, you should always specify the width and height of your videos. This will allow the browsers to assign suitable bandwidth without any extra effort.

Respect mobile users:
The number of people visiting websites from mobile devices increases with each passing day. That said, if you haven’t optimized your website for mobile, you’re on the wrong side of the trend.

Make sure your website is responsive. This means your site will be adaptable to all display resolutions and screen sizes. Additionally, your site must also be cable of detecting the orientation of the device for properly display the video.

Designing websites that will look good on every screen size is not easy. One way to combat this problem is by including responsive design in your web development.

Another trick for displaying videos on mobile is to prevent them from displaying. This can easily be accomplished by adding CSS codes to your website.

Video Optimization For Search Engine Ranking

Alternatively, you can always host your videos on top streaming platforms and then embed in your site. However, if you’re trying to achieve higher ranking in search results, you should consider hosting videos on your own domain.

Uploading videos to a streaming platform along with your website’s link will not provide the benefit you’re looking for. This is because Google will give preference to the streaming platform and not to our website.

Besides, self-hosted videos offers you significant flexibility regarding the look and feel of your video content. Additionally, you’ll be able to offer ad-free content to your visitors. The absence of distractions will automatically increase your chances of getting more visitors on your site.

Also keep in mind that self-hosted videos dictate that your website should be hosted on a dedicated server. Or at the very least, a virtual private server. Shared hosting services offers restricted bandwidth, which can create issues if a self-hosted video goes viral.

Wrapping It Up

Hopefully, the discussion above was useful in helping you to understand how to optimize video loading speed for your website. Plus, learning about the importance of optimizing videos.

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