Video on Shopify or Youtube? Which is faster?

[nagumi]

Which is faster for user experience and of course google pagespeed - adding a video via URL on the product page, or uploading the video directly to shopify? I'm not talking about embedding video, but rather using the product media section.

Thanks

[PageFly-Victor]

Hi @nagumi,

I'm Victor from PageFly Page Builder App, nice to meet you!

When you upload the video on Youtube, it will require the product page to load a bunch of scripts from Youtube server so it will slightly affect the page speed. Thus, I'd highly recommend you upload the video directly on Shopify.

As you do not use embedded video, please make sure that they meet the following requirements of Shopify https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/product-media/product-media-types#videos

Hope it helps.

Best regards, 

Victor | PageFly

[speedboostr · Accepted solution]

Hi @nagumi 

Great question! The fastest service for video is to purchase premium hosting via Cloudflare's stream add-on. Which requires you are already upgraded to professional DNS initially, then the video hosting option can be enabled and you can develop a video feature for your store. 

This is the fastest, and it's also the most costly method so it's not for everyone. For a more economical solution (and the more common one) is to utilize Youtube because it's really quick, but wit hone caveat - only when you make your own embedded solution with just simple liquid and html and do not copy paste their player into your theme.

This is because the copy paste code of the Youtube embed is extremely sub-optimal and loads tonnes of resources via an iframe which can cause render blocking and also increase the FID (First Input Delay) time, which culminates in a slower mobile page speed.

We can remedy this for you by modifying your product pages theme code to include youtube videos in the most performant manner so that you can still have videos and not take a performance hit, and achieve this with the smallest budget possible.

Please contact us so that we can schedule this work on your store!