Video Hosting & Optimization Guide - Product Videos

Are you worried that adding videos will slow down your store? It’s a valid concern, and we’ve designed our plugin with performance as a top priority. This guide will walk you through the best practices for hosting and optimizing your videos to ensure a fast, seamless experience for your customers.

Why We Prioritize Self-Hosted Videos

Product Videos for WooCommerce is designed to use videos uploaded directly to your WordPress Media Library. We’ve made this choice for a few key reasons:

Performance: By using self-hosted videos, we can avoid loading external scripts and tracking libraries from platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. This results in a faster, lighter page load.
Control: You have complete control over the look and feel of your video player. There are no third-party logos or “suggested videos” to distract your customers.
Privacy: Self-hosting means you’re not sending your customer’s data to third-party platforms. This is especially important for stores that need to comply with privacy regulations like GDPR.

While embedding from other platforms has its place, we believe that for a clean, fast, and professional e-commerce experience, self-hosting is the superior choice.

How to Optimize Your Videos for the Web

Before you upload a video to your store, it’s crucial to optimize it for the web. A few minutes of preparation can save you megabytes of file size and dramatically improve your page load times.

1. Compress Your Videos

Video compression is the process of reducing the file size of your video without a significant loss in quality. We recommend using a free, open-source tool called HandBrake for this.

A Quick Guide to HandBrake:

Open your video file in HandBrake.
Choose a preset: The “Fast 1080p30” or “Fast 720p30” presets are a great starting point.
Check the “Web Optimized” box. This is very important!
Start the encoding process.

This simple step can often reduce your video file size by 50-80%.

2. Choose the Right Video Format

We recommend using the MP4 format for your videos. It offers the best balance of quality, file size, and compatibility across all modern browsers.

3. Keep it Short

The best product videos are short and to the point. Aim for a video length of 15-60 seconds. This is long enough to showcase your product’s features without losing your customer’s attention.

Built-in Performance: Lazy Loading & Smart Playback

Beyond optimizing your video files, our plugin includes intelligent features to protect your site’s performance right out of the box.

On Shop & Category Pages:

Lazy Loading: Videos are lazy-loaded. This means the video file itself isn’t downloaded until it’s about to be viewed by the customer. Your initial page load remains fast and light, no matter how many products with videos are on the page.
Playback on Interaction: The video only starts to play when a customer either hovers their mouse over it or taps it on a mobile device. This prevents dozens of videos from trying to play at once, which would significantly slow down the user’s browser.

On Single Product Pages:

Optimized Loading: The main featured video and gallery videos are loaded efficiently alongside the product gallery, ensuring they don’t block the rest of your page from rendering.

These built-in features mean you can confidently enable videos across your store, knowing that we’re only loading them when they’re needed.

Understanding Your Hosting Environment

Your web host plays a role in how your videos are delivered to your customers. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Upload Limits: Most web hosts have a limit on the maximum file size you can upload to your WordPress site. If you’re having trouble uploading a video, you may need to ask your host to increase your upload_max_filesize limit.
Content Delivery Network (CDN): If you have a lot of videos, you may want to consider using a CDN. A CDN stores copies of your files on servers around the world, so your videos are delivered to your customers from the location closest to them. This can significantly improve your video loading times.

By following these best practices, you can confidently add videos to your store without sacrificing performance. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team.