Part of the Website Ownership Tips video series.
Intro to website videos
Welcome! If you own a website or you’re a website designer, this tip is for you. Let’s talk about videos.
We love videos! Aren’t they so much more engaging than plain images or paragraphs of text? Videos bring content to life, but did you know they’re some of the biggest contributors to slow website load times? Videos can really bog down a server, because they’re a much larger file size than anything else loading on the web page.
How to use a video hosting service
So how do you strike the balance between showing videos (that’s good, we want to do that!) and not having a slow website overall? I’ve trained my clients to first upload videos to a video hosting service (think YouTube), then embed them on the website. In most cases, that’s your best option.
How to embed a YouTube-hosted video on your web page
YouTube’s hosting servers are world-class. They have all the compression, performance and technology to serve up your video without bogging down your website, compared with hosting the video yourself.
If you have a WordPress website, that means don’t upload your .mp4 or .mov file directly to the Media Library. Instead, go to YouTube, visit your channel and click Upload. The upload generates a YouTube.com URL. Copy that URL and paste it onto your web page. If you’re using a page builder (e.g. Divi), paste the link into the Video module.
That’s today’s tip! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me for suggestions.
About the author
Leighton Smith is Pioneer Media’s website designer, web developer and webmaster, based in East Tennessee. As a solopreneur, he is each client’s one point of contact and has built hundreds of websites since learning to code in 2006.
