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Hey everyone! I was wondering if you had any suggestions on the best way to speed up load times for pages with hero videos. I currently have my video length at under 20 seconds, at 720p and a total file size of about 9.8MB for the mp4 version and 8mb for the webm version. I know that reducing the length will help, but outside of that, are there any other recommendations to help reduce load times? It seems like this is the main pain point for the site when running performance reports through GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights.
Thanks in advance!
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I do everything in my power to avoid self-hosted video unless it’s absolutely essential (like for a company who makes video).
It goes something like:
1. Can we just have an image? – No?
2. Can we use a vector animation with lottie or svg? – No?
3. Can we be a bit arty with a slow cross-fading slider. – No?
4. Can I use Handbrake to crush it into 480p, 12fps, and hide the graininess behind a clever overlay (I’ve reduced 3min videos to a few mb this way)? – No?
5. Can you accept a very slow loading page? – No?
6. Can you afford ‘uber-bastard’ hosting or VPS with CDN? – No?
7. Crawl backwards from 5 to 1 to find out when their lack of budget finally makes them realistic about the site they can have.
Otherwise – you can look for a video hosting service like Vimeo where there’s a plan that’s less than option 6… and serve the video from there.