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Video content is a great, versatile medium that gives you the perfect opportunity to bring new audiences. Everyone cares about an efficient website, which at the same time attracts recipients with its graphic design and additions in the form of interesting and informative videos. But unfortunately, adding videos to a website can significantly lower its performance by increasing the loading time.
Your creativity used to make your content can’t be wasted by videos that are not optimized and make your page load endlessly. Every visitor to your site is looking for immediate answers to the troubling questions. Therefore, video optimization seems to be a useful skill when you imagine how daunting it is to wait a long time for content.
In this article, you will learn how video content, depending on some variables, is affecting your website performance.
Video Streaming Directly from Your Server
Back in the days – When there still were the dark ages for the users of the internet – users needed to fully download a video file before it could be viewed. Now, in order to record your videos, you will only need the camera phone, and after edits, you can stream your clips straight from your server. Video is delivered to the web user in small portions so it could be played in their browsers promptly.
Additionally, as a website owner, you can use adaptive streaming to change the quality of the video automatically. A video player often provides this “auto quality” feature and chooses the current quality based on a few variables. Two factors are determining the choice of quality:
● processing capabilities
● the network capacity of a user’s browser.
Muted Videos and How to Handle Them
It happens that you want to upload a beautiful, informative video to your website, but from the very beginning, you didn’t want to have any voice in it (maybe with subtitles only). You need to remember that even if you muted the audio in the editing process, it still exists in the video file.
The best practice is to actually remove this sound data from your muted file and to save it without it, leaving the size of the video only. In most cases, you can use the same editing tool to get rid of the audio data. Just don’t mute it, erase it completely. Sometimes you could try to omit the audio while exporting the file.
Videos and Data Compression Tools
It is an eternal dilemma – whether to keep the amazing video quality or reduce its size so that the website loads faster. With data compression tools, you don’t need to worry about that. You can use, for example, HandBrake to compress your video files without reducing the quality.
Having high-quality videos on your website, and fast load time are making your page look more professional. Please don’t degrade the quality while you can have perfect, smoothly displayed videos without sacrificing this essential feature. Moreover, people tend to save high quality content with tools like Bitdownloader and they share it with family and friends.
Videos on Mobile Devices
When thinking about improving page loading speed, please have in mind mobile devices users. Imagine your page visitor, who is looking for a specific piece of information, but when they click on it, a blank page appears. After a few seconds, they just switch to another search engine result, and you lose your potential client.
The short time of page load is crucial for better user experience. You can use a Lazy Load for Video plugin for 500 or even 700 milliseconds saved in site load.
Size and Format of the Video
The size of the video you upload matters. Browsers need to assign the required bandwidth to your clip, so try to spare them the extra work by defining the height and width in CSS or HTML.
Try to convert your videos online to HTML5 formats (WebM or MP4); it gives you the advantage of delivering the videos without any additional plugins. If you use WordPress, you can erase the slow extras from the core of Twenty Nineteen Theme, to see the tremendous difference in loading time.
Conclusion
As long as you optimize your videos properly, they won’t impact your website’s loading time. Compressing and choosing the right format will help you reduce your audience’s waiting time. Also, many people search the web using their smartphones, so remember, that prioritizing mobile users is not a bad idea.
Make sure that the costs of adding videos don’t outweigh the benefits of having them on your website. Sometimes a particular theme allows you to post a video in a website header. Try with posting videos in various places on your page, and optimize them. You will soon find the perfect way to have both high-quality video content and fast website load time.
