Managing and maximising the impact of video

Source – Smashing Magazine, Video Playback On The Web: Video Delivery Best Practices (Part 2)

That means, including embedded videos on your website can slow things down... a lot, which impacts your website's sustainability, SEO, accessibility and performance negatively.

While there are many good reasons for reducing the amount of video shown on your organisation's website, it’s sustainability we'll focus on.

Following these steps can help align you and your team into maximising the benefits of video whilst acting responsibly in terms of climate change.

Maximising the benefits of video: 

• Do you need the video?
• Consider alternative media types
• Use a green third-party platform
• Minimise video length

Do you need the video?

Well, the obvious way to reduce the impact of a video is to just take it down. This sounds a bit dramatic and oversimplified, but does the video actually need to be there? As with any content on a website, if it’s not valuable to users, remove it. Because video is the most data heavy content, the reason for having it must be very easy to rationalise.

Consider alternative media types

Okay, if we’ve answered the first question with Yes, let’s dig a bit deeper into it's function, and why it’s a video. The video might be:

Autoplaying video 

These types of videos are common on websites, however a trend moving away from these has been observed in recent years. Many websites which score high for sustainability do not include these kinds of video, as they are data draining, meaning worse for the environment. Autoplaying videos without pause buttons are not considered accessible.

Video can help provide a storytelling aspect, which is important to capture on homepages, but telling a story can be done in other ways. Consider the below alternatives:

• An image collage
   
• A static hero image with impactful typography
   
• An illustration

Education and resources

Videos can be effective for educational purposes, especially for demonstrating processes or actions. However, in many cases, the same information can be conveyed through text, infographics or still images with descriptive captions. For accessibility, videos must include captions but even then, they may exclude some users with disabilities.

Featured third party content 

There is not much you can do in terms of presenting third party content in a different format, however you can choose to reduce the impact on the load speed of your website by linking off to the video hosted on a third-party platform. However, this does not reduce overall data consumption and therefore improve sustainability.

Use a green third-party platform

All third party code will impact the load speed of a website. It's worth checking if the third party provider your video is hosted on has a sustainability policy. 

Minimise video length

Along with compressing video before uploading to a third-party platform, reducing the length of a video will often impact the overall file size of the video, meaning less data consumed. As they say, why say in 10 what you can say in 2!

Take away

Incorporating video responsibly on your website not only enhances user experience but also contributes to a more sustainable web, aligning with SEO, accessibility and climate-conscious goals.