We human beings love visuals, which is why videos are in demand these days. Almost every successful online platform uses videos because these are very effective at increasing sales and driving traffic to your website. Videos and animations bring your website to life and add personality to it. Users prefer videos over static images.
According to Wyzowl, more than 87% of website owners use videos as a marketing tool because it generates good ROI, which means higher profits. But videos also pose a great challenge as this heavy multimedia can significantly affect your website loading speed. Therefore, you need to optimize your heavy videos to not slow down your website and offer high UX and SEO.
Why Should You Use Videos on Your Website?
Multimedia content like videos, GIFs and web animations are a great way to keep your users engaged on your website. Everyone loves visuals, and it is a great way to increase website traffic and attract more users. Here are some of the reasons why you should be using multimedia on your websites:
- Videos are on demand because these can be accessed on any device, including mobile phones and tablets. 82% of users on Twitter, the social media platform, watch video content.
- Brands that use videos experience 49% faster revenue growth than companies that don’t.
- Vides enhance the audiovisual experience of your online platform.
- Videos are easy to digest and can easily be shared on social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
- Videos boost your website SEO as search engines like Google prioritize videos compared to text content as videos have a 41% higher click-through rate than text content.
- Webpages that incorporate videos are 53 times more likely to be ranked on top of SERPs.
Tips to Optimize Heavy Videos on Your Website for Boosting Performance
Websites need to provide high-quality multimedia content to their users. But high-quality videos are quite heavy and may increase the loading speed of your website, thus impacting your SEO. Here are a few tips to optimize heavy videos on your website and enhance user experience:
1). Use HTML formats for videos
Websites usually embed videos directly from online platforms like YouTube, Dailymotion, etc. Some platforms also use browser plugins and codecs to embed videos from players like Windows Media Player, etc., but these severely affect your website speed. If you want better video content control on your website, you can use HTML5 video tags.
With HTML5, you can easily embed videos, and it does not require Flash plugins. Now using HTML formats, you can encode multimedia directly to your website and ensure its original quality. This way, you will not have to embed code manually. It supports MP4, WebMG, AVI, MOV, MPEG2 formats, and many more.
2). Stream Videos without Plugin
Now you can also stream videos from the server on your website without using plugins. WHATWG has developed a version of HTML that allows users to include videos and other multimedia without adding any plugins. Many eCommerce websites use videos directly without plugins through web streaming to enhance UX and website loading speed. By using the <video> tag, you can link to a video directly from HTML, as shown below:
3). Video Music and Audio
If you are using many heavy videos on your website, you might want to consider the audio of these multimedia. For example, if you have naturally muted videos on your website, remove their audio to save space and increase your website loading speed. For rendering, you can use render farm blender which is very fast.
This will not be a problem as most of the videos, like headline videos or promotional videos on the homepage, don’t require audio as it focuses on visual enhancement. You can use video editing tools, as mentioned below, and get rid of your audio data.
4). Compress Video Size
High-quality videos are undoubtedly amazing and add appeal to your website and enhance user experience. However, these heavy files can significantly affect your website speed and overall performance. But there are several ways to increase your website loading speed, and one of them is compressing your multimedia.
For example, you want to upload a 1 GB video file on your website, it will take you around fifteen to twenty minutes if your upload speed is around 500kbps. That is a lot! Therefore, the best option is to compress your multimedia. But during the process, make sure that you don’t compromise on the quality of the video. There are multiple video compressing tools (Sony Vegas, Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, iMovie, etc.) that you can use to optimize heavy videos and improve your website speed, and boost SEO.
5). Page Loading Comes First
Understand that your webpage loading comes first, and your video content comes. If you have a video on your webpage that loads automatically once the user clicks on the link, make sure it doesn’t load fully until the webpage is fully loaded and its contents can be seen. Therefore, your webpage loading should prioritize, and your multimedia should load. This will help you enhance the overall user experience.
You can also use a Content delivery network (CDN). According to Cloudflare, a content delivery network refers to “a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery on internet content.” CDN helps boost your website’s multimedia content delivery and your overall speed and performance. So, consult a professional SEO Services Company today and enjoy higher website traffic.
Enhance Your Website’s SEO!
Whether you can add videos to your website or not depends upon your target audience and the industry your business belongs to. But these days, even eCommerce platforms use videos because it enhances user experiences and makes the website appear more interactive. Therefore, videos are very popular and trendy in the website industry because it also boosts your SEO. However, without a proper strategy, this multimedia can slow down your website and lead to bad user experiences that would ultimately lead to a shift in organic traffic.
Therefore, be careful when adding videos and multimedia content to your website. It can affect your overall SEO; however, it can help you retain and boost traffic if implemented correctly.