Do Images And Videos Slow My Site Down?

The idea that your page could be taking too long to load because of all the videos and pictures you have on them is a hard truth to accept. Photos and videos are supposed to make your website better and more attractive, not worse.

Unfortunately, having pictures and videos on your website could be why the page is loading too slowly. The main problem is that your site may have images that have not been optimized for a regular website.

Why Images Are Slowing Your Website Down

There are a few reasons why images are slowing down your website.

• The images are heavy- A large image will take more time to load. Large images are also heavy, so multiple large photos on your site will add to loading time and slow down the site.
• Multiple file formats- Some file formats are naturally more significant than others. Browsers often load JPEG, PNG, and GIF forms quickly but struggle with large sizes such as TIFF and BMP.
• Text graphics- Visuals that have texts are another problem that could be eating up a chunk of load time. Graphics like these take much longer to load as compared to a simple font alternative.
• Images without caching information- Browser caching will temporarily store some of the photos on a user's computer so that they do not have to load each time they visit your page.
• Images with unspecified dimensions- It is essential to scale down images in order to improve on load time. For example, if you have an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels, but you have scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels, your browser must load ten times more than necessary.

Why Videos Are Slowing Down Your Website

When you embed a third party video from a platform like YouTube, your user's browser will have to make several extra requests to render the page. YouTube has an average of 3 or 4 requests to provide three different resolutions, and one form the still image used as a video cover.

It gets worse when you embed a video with ads that will run, and it adds on to the requests. Thus, your website will load a lot slower. Unfortunately, the requests to the external resources cannot be controlled, and so your load speeds will always be low.

The Solution

For videos, the best thing to do is to use lightboxes. Lightboxes get rid of the unnecessary server requests, which will speed up your website. These requests will only be made when the user clicks on the video, and it plays.

Lightboxes also offer an excellent crisp video cover that can be used in place of regular thumbnails. You may also use a screenshot of the video. Best of all, your user will not be distracted from your video when it opens in a full-screen lightbox.

For large images, ensure that you download smaller versions or change the resolution to lower using an image editor. Ensure that the image is in easy to load formats such as JPEG and PNG. Finally, avoid using text graphics for load time and better SEO.

Speed Up Your Website With Precision

Precision Creative's superb website development team is well versed in any and all forms of site speed optimization. Contact us to discuss how we can take your website to the next level.