Background Video eating hosting bandwidth

sophiekearns

If I have a 6MB background video playing on a loop on my website home page. Initially the video was bigger and I found the monthly bandwidth threshold of 50GB was getting used very rapidly. I have since reduced the video to 6MB in size.

My question is should the video get cached in the browser when initially played or does is eat 6MB of bandwidth every time it loops?

i.e. the 6MB video lasts about 1 minute. If visitor opens up my home page and leaves it open for 100 minutes. Could that potentially use up 600MB of the bandwidth allotted by my hosting package?

Probably a very basic question, I have been out of web dev for quiet a while and am trying to edge back in. I know there are CDN's and other options but was hoping to keep it simple.

Thanks in advance. Any help or advice much appreciated.

Baz_

It depends. What definitely should happen is each time the page is loaded as long as the visitor stays on that page the video should loop from what was downloaded on page load.

What happens when a user revisits the page depends on the users browser cache settings. Also how your page is coded will have an impact. It sounds like the file being accessed is being accessed using the same file name every time, if that's the case again the browser should be caching and accessing the local copy each time it's requested, assuming that's how the browser is set up.

You can exert a bit more control by generating and updating etags per resource (especially large resources). See: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/http-caching & https://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-http-caching/ for some better info.

HTH

Victor

sophiekearns wrote: »

If I have a 6MB background video playing on a loop on my website home page.

Realise that auto-playing video (or audio) can alienate website users.

Victor

Victor wrote: »

Realise that auto-playing video (or audio) can alienate website users.

Nothing says "my website is complete and utter shlt" quite like a $200 video autoplaying that was made by some Ugandan on Fiverr.

Axwell

The video and entire website should be cached the first time a person visits so there shouldn't be a need for their browser to pull the resources again such as the video unless there is a change in content or the cache purged.

But why have a 1 min video at all? What benefit is it serving over a hero image with some intro text and a CTA? Generally you will find more reasons against having a background video than you will in favour of one.

Have you done any analysis on users to see if they are watching the video or just scrolling immediately down the page? A 6mb video file is going to affect the site loading times and the general user experience so unless it serves a purpose id be ditching it altogether.

beauf

It's considered obnoxious design to use an auto playing video in a home page. Perhaps yours is the exception, but just so that you're aware.

tricky D

Have to agree with the others. Default loading autoplay videos are plain bad unless there is a clear business purpose for it - almost all such usage does not have this and thus it should be dumped.

A few further reasons:
Bad for mobile data usage.
Bad performance on less powerful smartphones.
Bad for page load times = SEO hit.
Takes focus from text, usually meaning less text = SEO opportunity missed.
Bad for measurement. Removing user choice means everybody views the video regardless of how effective or ineffective it is and you can not provide any worthwhile measurement of the video quality as users have no choice in whether it earns a quality click.

You have to be focused and ruthless when it comes to homepages.

sophiekearns

Thanks for all the advice. When I said my site it was one I am developing for a friend as a means just dipping my toe in the water. Being out of the game for so long and a bit unsure of myself I was trying to balance what is technically best, what looks right and what my friend wants while also keeping it simple by not dragging cdn's in to the equation! Anyway I have talked her down to a smaller intro video which comes in at less than 2mb. That should be ok right?

Found out why my bandwidth was being eaten at such a rate too. Client had replaced the background video with a 90mb version unbeknownst to me, meanwhile I was making style updates and frequently hitting crtl+F5 to load the page without cache to verify my styling changes. Those 90mb's weren't long clocking up.

My initial plan was to host the background video externally using YouTube or Vimeo but they came with a couple of hitches. The big one being that they move on to similar videos from other vendors totally unrelated to your site after playing your one. The second thing is Gutenburg ultimate addons really make it easy to play a background video and overlay content but the the video seems to have to be hosted locally. It made sense to use this facility if possible.

thanks again!

beauf

Because the design puts it on the home page it means any mistakes are amplified because everyone HAS to run the video.

The design is the fundamental issue with that. But that is personal preference. A lot of marking campaigns getting people to watch the video is paramount.

if you want to remove your personal bias from it. Do a survey across 10 or more people and see what the feedback is. That will remove creator/owner bias from the design.

Axwell

sophiekearns wrote: »

That should be ok right?

No video at all would still be better but it depends what other assets are on the website and if they have been optimised also. You should run the website through GT Metrix or Pingdom when its done and see what the loading time is. That will also tell you then where the bottlenecks are.