Can adding videos to your website slow it down? The answer is: YES.
In this video I show you how to do it so it doesn’t slow down your site.
Adding video to your website is good in terms of SEO. People enjoy watching videos, so they spend more time on your site and have a better user experience.
I wanted to figure out how to improve my website page speed, so I did a little test. On my testimonials page I have a mix of Vimeo and YouTube videos. Mixing them up in one page, each one of them will have to load, thus slowing down your site. On Google pagespeed insights, it scored 62, which isn’t too bad, but it can be better.
Removing the videos, I got 89 points. Then I did some tweaking to the videos so they load differently, and I got 90 points!
How to speed up wordpress page load when you have videos on it:
Simply use a lightbox! I use WonderPlugin’s WP Lightbox, which you can get here.
Using a lightbox will make all your videos look the same way on your page, and when you click play, it opens the video up in a box. So what it’s doing is it’s holding of on starting the YouTube player until you start the actual video, so it’s not making your page load slow in the beginning.
Give this plugin a try and let us know in the comments if this solution worked for you!