How to Make Your Website Faster by Optimizing Embedded Videos
People use videos for many different reasons. Professional marketers use them in their marketing schemes, companies of all sorts use them for websites, product demos, and many other purposes. And individuals use videos widely.
Sometimes videos can get unnecessarily bogged down due to their large size or other causes. This can make life difficult for the people who use them.
Fortunately, there are ways that you can deal with this. Several tools are on the market now with methods that help to optimize embedded video and make it run more efficiently. We will explore this further in the sections below.
What Contributes to Slow Videos?
In considering the challenge of optimization, it is worthwhile to step back and think about what it is that leads to slow video speeds. Factors include:
- Length of videos. Longer videos obviously have a larger file size than smaller ones.
- Resolution. The higher the resolution in a given video, the larger it will be.
- Audio. The audio of a video adds weight to the video.
- Hosting. Whether you host videos yourself or a third-party hosts them affects the optimization level. Different hosts compress videos to different degrees.
Things That You Can Do to Improve Speed
Fortunately, there are specific steps that you can take to reduce the weight that your files are making on your website. Follow each of these steps and you should see a significant improvement in your video functioning.
- In the Homepage Hero Section, use video in a limited capacity.
- Don’t use more than one video per page. Too many could overload your pages.
- Use a compression tool to reduce the size of your videos.
- Stick to video only unless you specifically need the audio component.
- Use lightweight file formats if you can.
If you have to convert videos from one format to another, think about how to convert video with the right parameters for optimal speed.
If you try each of these things and still experience speed issues, you might need to compress your videos more or somehow further reduce their size. There are also ways that you can figure out exactly what your speed issues are. Also, remember that 70% of websites run more slowly on mobile devices, so you could be losing your mobile audience if your site isn’t up to speed.
Concerns About Video Embeds
There are complications that can arise when you attempt to embed your own videos on a site. You need professional-level need to enable correct video behavior. This can involve cumulative layout shift issues. In other words, video elements can shift in their original appearance to varying degrees depending on the size of the video.
Checking Website Speed
If you use JavaScript on your website, you should ideally have videos that are less than 300 Kib in size. Otherwise, your video can slow down or fail to load altogether, which will cause people to turn away. Remember that 40% of people won’t wait more than three seconds for a website video to run.
Google Speed Recommendations
Google has a PageSpeed Insights section in which it provides steps on determining your page speed. To do this, simply go to the page and type in your URL. Then click on Analyze, and you will see the results of your page speed analysis. Google will also provide you with suggestions for improvement.
Once you have made the changes that Google recommends, you can go through the process again and assess your improvement.
Conclusion
Embedding videos in websites is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. You need to have the correct parameters to a video for it to run smoothly on your site or it will slow down and possibly fail to load. You should make an assessment of your site speed and make whatever adjustments are necessary to make it faster.
