But why shouldn’t you consider hosting videos on your site even when you have enough space to accommodate them on your host?
This and many more questions are some of the questions we’re faced with by clients who want to have their video content uploaded and displayed on their website.
But our response each time has been the same:
It’s not recommended to host videos on your website, rather you host on a third-party platform and embed them on your website instead.
And this is why…
It’s not a matter of if it’s possible or not possible, but a matter of efficiency.
It impairs the loading speed of your web pages
Yes! You read that clearly! Adding videos directly to your website can slow down your web pages. Videos are great when projected in fine definition, most people like me always go for the finest highest quality resolution of any video so as to make sure they capture every moment in the video.
Video files use a lot of server resources due to their volume in size. It will eat up a lot of your website bandwidth and your site users will be worse off when trying to consume the video content due to the bad user experience they may get from trying to watch the video as it buffers.
It will not only affect your users’ experience; it can also negatively impact your SEO. According to Envisage digital, a one-second delay will reduce customer satisfaction by up to 16%.
Other main reasons you should avoid hosting a video on your website are:
- It can become a very daunting process
- Increase the cost of your website because more bandwidth and other server resources are consumed.
- If so, many users access these video pages at the same time, it can cause your website to crash.
- It can ruin your web positioning
- It can affect customer experience
- It can amount to a poor conversion rate.
An ideal solution to this would be to host the videos on third-party video hosting platforms and then embed the videos on your website. This way your video content is easier to manage and organize on third-party platforms than when you host it on your WordPress website.
Video platforms to host videos:
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google and doubles as the largest video platform with billions of views daily. It’s owned and managed by Google and has fast become a choice video platform for both individuals and Businesses.
Vimeo is just like YouTube, but it adopts a more professional approach, users have all they need to publish and distribute their content.
Other video hosting platforms include;
- TikTok
- Dailymotion
- Twitch
- Wistia.
