Intro to Website Videos

🤩 Welcome! So if you own a website or you are website designer, this tip is for you! Let’s talk about VIDEOS.

🎥 You may be watching the video above. 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 are some of the biggest contributors to slow website load times? That’s right, videos can really bog down a server, and why do you think that is? Because videos are 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.) but not having a slow website overall? What do you think would be the ideal way to accomplish this? My clients have been trained that we first upload our videos to a video hosting service (think YouTube!) then embed them onto your website. In most cases, that’s going to be your best option.

How to Embed a YouTube Hosted Video Onto 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 if you were to host the video yourself). If you have a WordPress website, that means do not upload your .mp4 / .mov video file directly to the Media Library. Instead, go to YouTube, visit your channel and click the UPLOAD button. The upload will generate a YouTube.com URL. That the YouTube URL and copy and paste it onto your web page. If you are using a page builder (e.g. Divi), paste the link into the Video module.

✍🏼 That’s today’s tip! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me for suggestions!