Importance of Optimizing Videos on Your Site

The main objectives of having videos are to attract more visitors to your site, improve engagement, and also boost conversion.

Videos appeal more to the younger adults which makes it important for brands that target this segment of the market to include video content.

However, videos may prevent you from achieving your marketing objectives if they take longer than expected to load.

The average web visitor expects a web page to finish loading within 3 seconds and the same applies to video content. Also, the average time a visitor spends on a website is 15 seconds and you want to make every second spent on your site to count.

Your best bet is to optimize video content on your website to ensure that they load as fast as expected. To help you with optimizing videos for your website, here are 5 actionable tips you can get started with right away.

1 - Use of Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that contain cached copies of content assets such as images, videos, and site codes.

These servers are spread out in different geographic locations with the nearest server used to deliver the content assets to web users.

This means a web visitor that is located in New York will likely be served page content by a server located in the same city or nearby.

This helps speed up the time it takes for a web page to complete loading on a web browser. When used to serve video to your audience, it cuts down the time it takes for the video to load.

2 - Compress Your Videos

Video compression is a great tactic to use if you want to improve the time it takes for your videos to load. However, there's a catch if you are using this method to boost your video's load speed.

Compressing a video involves the use of special tools to reduce the size of the video while retaining the video quality. Some powerful tools you can utilize to compress your video files include: VLC Media Player, Handbrake, Adobe Encoder, Firefogg, and FFmpeg.

If you reduce the size of a video, it will likely affect the quality of the video also. And if the quality is poor, it will discourage your web visitors from watching them.

So you have to ensure you retain the video quality as much as possible when you compress videos for your site.

3 - Convert Your Videos to HTML5 Format

You can convert your videos to a web-friendly format that is accepted on different devices and platforms.

Sometimes, video editing tools will output your video files in certain file formats that may not work across all platforms. It is best to convert your videos to HTML5 to enable your video to work nicely both on web browsers and mobile devices.

An online tool like WebM is great for converting your videos into HTML5 format that all platforms support.

4 - Make Your Videos as Short as Possible

The size of a video will affect the video quality and the bandwidth it requires to stream nicely. If the video is too large, it will most likely buffer which leads to the poor user experience of your web visitors.

To counter this, you can focus on creating videos that are as short as possible without affecting the quality. Through this approach, you will make it easier for mobile phone users to enjoy your videos without it buffering.