Hello,
On our shopify webiste - the homepage video which is embedded via a youtube link is very slow to load. I have reduced the length and size of the uploaded youtube video, however its still very slow to load on shopify.
Here is a link: https://shavronproducts.com
Any suggestions of how to fix this so the video instantly loads and play?
Kindest regards,
Shavron.
Hey, @Shavron !
Thanks for sharing your question with our network, and a very warm welcome to our community. My name is Olivia and I’m part of the Shopify team here.
I was happy to look over the website link you shared, and I similarly experienced a slower load time for the video on your homepage. I approximate it took about 3 seconds to fully load and autoplay, and considering that’s the average amount of time you have to grab your consumer’s attention, I can understand why you want to increase loading speed.
The first important detail you shared was that the video is embedded through a YouTube link and not uploaded into the media of your store directly. This is a critical step for page speed that will keep your server free and promote faster load times. With that being said, I took a deeper look at your home page for total load time through Chrome’s developer tools to see what else could be impacting load times. Let me show you a little bit of what I found:
This dev tool is a great indication of what happens on your site behind the scenes. The information you want to pay most attention to is the number of requests, the load time, and finish time.
An unedited Shopify theme typically makes 25-50 requests to function. While there’s no limit to the number of requests you can have on your site, once you surpass 160 requests you can expect a decline in site performance. So what is a request? This will largely depend on your theme and any apps you have installed. The best rule of thumb here is to remove any functions that are not actively helping you make sales.
From the screenshot, we see that you store had made 220 requests. As I type this forum post there are 678 requests and still counting on your home page. This gives us insight into the sheer size of your home page and how a browser handles each additional request.
Another idea would be to implement a static image instead of autoplay for your video. Static images will load significantly faster and allow the video to “lazy load” in the background. That way, once a user hits play it will have pre-loaded elements and run faster.
If you need assistance with any of this, we have a wide array of vetted Shopify Experts available for hire to take a look at your website and implement code changes specific to your custom theme.
While we are on the topic of site performance and page speed, I highly recommend you take a look at these 13 tips to boost site performance and increase your conversion by up to 2x!
I sincerely hope this helps, but please let me know if you have other questions I can answer.
Warm regards,
Hello Olivia!
I greatly appreciate your support and time for responding to my question and answering it in great detail!
Is there anyway that I can help you in return - perhaps a 10/10 satisfaction rating?
Kind regards,
Avron.
That’s incredibly sweet of you, @Shavron , I’m so glad I could help.
Your kind words left on our thread made my day. Merchants like you are the reason we work so hard everyday, and I look forward to supporting you again in the future.
Warm regards,
