The Impact of Videos on site speed and the solution on Shopify

The use of videos on eCommerce websites get more important every year, the customers are now used to seeing more videos every day. But the downside with videos on an eCommerce store running on Shopify is that they slow down the site speed and are not SEO friendly, so what’s the solution then ? This is the purpose of this article.

Why Videos are important in eCommerce?

It is obvious that videos are more engaging, more natural, pleasant to watch and are more memorable than pictures or text, videos help customer know what your business is about and help merchants easily highlight the perks of their products among their competitors.

Explanation videos on homepage or product page become like a MUST in 2021 and beyond.

The issue with videos on Shopify

Shopify has recently included page speed score directly on the main dashboard of their merchants, so merchants can know if their site is fast or slow to react quickly and optimize the speed.

The speed score on Shopify is calculated based in this simple formula ((homepage+collection+product page speed) / 3)

There are many technical factors related to the theme being used that negatively impact the site speed, and there are some factors which are not theme related, like non-compressed images, heavy homepage with tons of content, …

And among the technical factors related to the theme, is how the video codes and scripts are coded to serve speed free videos.

Once you use a video section (a video from youtube for example) the video is auto-run on page load, and external Youtube scripts are loaded, those script significantly decrease the site speed, so what is the solution then to have nice videos without impacting the store speed ?

Scrowp Theme is the first Shopify themes provider to come up with a genius solution

Scrowp theme, the leading designer of premium Shopify themes, known for solving major eCommerce issues, like the blurry coupon which is the best way to solve the boring entrance popups, has came up with a solution for slow videos.

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How then ?

Instead of running the video script on page load, Scrowp Theme developers opted for an image poster, the image poster overlays the video with a play button, and the video won’t run until the visitor hits the play button

The picture you are seeing below (which seems a video) is in fact a lazyloaded poster, which covers the video, once you click play, the video is loaded then, so on page initial load, the video is not preloaded, only the image is.

SEO advantage

If you use a standard premium Shopify theme, the only thing you can add to the video section is the video URL, there is no way to add an ALT TEXT, so search engines like google can recognize what the video is about.

So the other advantage with this genius way to play videos, is the ability to add the ALT text to the image poster, this way you will have a fast site, and you will increase your chances to get on top of Google searches.

What about an embedded video ?

The good news, is that on Scrowp theme, you can also use an internal video, you can upload the video in Shopify file and use this internal video instead of the Youtube/Vimeo video — Live demo

What about product videos ?

Here again, Scrowp Theme developers used their intelligence to serve Speed and SEO friendly product videos

Conclusion

Videos on homepage or on product page is a great way to increase User Experience and sales by consequence, videos will give your website a professional look, and your site will be fast on desktop and mobile devices if you go with Scrowp theme