That’s awesome you want to use videos in your product listing. There are many cases where it has helped increase conversion, especially for products that need a bit of an explanation.
I would suggest using a theme that supports video and hosting through the backend of Shopify.
This also depends on your theme, but product videos are generally added in the same place as the images are. This ensures a uniform place for your media to sit.
Your page should load faster if you use Shopify’s native feature for adding video to the product page. If you’re customizing your theme and embedding it in the product description it’s hard to say whether or not it will load faster as there can be many variables.
Feel free to share what theme you’re using. You can also try to simply add the video by dragging and dropping it onto the product page in the admin.
I’d say for 1 that using Youtube or Vimeo, Youtube preferably, is better than trying to host the video directly on your store. It’ll give you maximum browser compatibility and more consistent load speed throughout the world.
@casey-customs Thank you for that help! You think Youtube is better than Vimeo? The only issue with YouTube is that it suggests other videos afterwords that are from other people’s YouTube channels (therefore encouraging them to leave my site). Any insights?
Wow what a thorough response! I cannot thank you enough! I have a few questions - please bear with me as technology is NOT my forte.
I have a question about your suggestion 1 above. This would be very cool if possible on my theme! Hosting through the backend of Shopify. This means I don’t upload the images and videos directly to the product pages? I am using Craft version 4.0.1 Is this possible?
The Craft theme does in fact support product videos. Try dragging your product video into the product admin page and setting it as the first media selection. Then preview your page and it should show the product video. You can see mention of the product videos on the Craft theme page.
Adding videos to any page would cause it to load slower. Anything you add will do that - even adding more text would cause it to load more slowly although it would be imperceptible. The fastest loading page possible is a totally blank one with no images and no words and no links, and certainly no videos but that doesn’t make for a very useful store. So it’s up to you to strike the balance between speed and functions.
Hahaha that is hilarious! I definitely don’t want a blank page to load.
But would loading the video in the video section of the theme be slower
than hosting it on Youtube or Vimeo?
Generally yes. Especially if the video is particularly long and/or high quality. It would greatly rely on your customers’ computer being modern and fully updated and totally free of malware since it would be entirely up to their computer to load the full video and render it out. Better to let Youtube handle that side of it, then all their computer has to do is show it.
This can vary depending on the video file size and quality. One thing you can do is test the page speed and compare it to YouTube and Shopify. Shopify does its best to optimize media to increase page speed times but it does depend on your files as well.
Personally, I tend to compress my videos before adding them to my shop by using TinyWow. It will decrease your file size and load your video much faster. If it’s still slow you can compress it a few times. Try adding the video and loading the page yourself using data and wifi. If it’s a bit slow just compress it to increase speed and you should see it load faster!
Feel free to drop a link to your product page once you’ve added the video and I’m happy to check it out as well!
but that doesn’t make for a very useful store. So it’s up to you to strike the balance between speed and functions.