Video on a business website

When video genuinely helps

When the thing being explained is physical or visual. A process that takes four paragraphs to describe can take twenty seconds to show, and a finished job filmed rather than photographed carries more of what it was actually like.

It also helps for the person. A short clip of the owner explaining how they work does more for trust than any amount of writing about values, particularly for a business somebody is inviting into their home.

And it helps where a customer needs to see something work before buying. A demonstration answers the question directly in a way a description never quite does.

Where it does not

As a background behind text. Decorative video is the single heaviest thing on most pages that carry one, it makes text harder to read, and it is downloaded by every visitor whether or not they look at it.

As a replacement for text somebody needs to search or skim. Information locked inside a video cannot be scanned, copied, or read by anything, so hours, prices and coverage must exist as text regardless.

And anywhere it plays without being asked. Autoplay with sound is the fastest way to have somebody close a tab, and it is still common on small business sites.

Host it elsewhere

Serving a video file from your own site means every visitor downloads it from wherever your site is hosted, with no adaptive quality and no resilience on a poor connection.

A video platform handles the encoding, the bandwidth and the fallback to lower quality automatically, which is a genuinely difficult engineering problem you do not want to own.

The trade is that an embedded player loads third-party code and usually sets cookies. Our page on third-party scripts covers that and the consent question it raises.

What a video on a business site needs

The list below is what separates a video that helps from one that costs load time and returns nothing. Most business videos carry the first item and none of the rest.

• A reason to exist that words could not cover
• A still image standing in until somebody clicks
• No autoplay, and never any sound unprompted
• Captions, written rather than automatic
• A text summary of what it says
• A visible length, so people can decide
• Nothing important that exists only inside it

Load it only when asked

Show a still image with a play control and load the player only when somebody clicks it. That removes the entire weight of the embed from every visit where nobody watches, which is most of them.

Most platforms and website tools support this pattern now, sometimes called a facade. It is the single biggest improvement available to a page carrying video.

It also defers the cookies the embed would have set, which moves a consent problem from every visit to only the visits where somebody chose to watch.

Captions are not optional

A substantial share of people watch without sound, on a phone, in public. Without captions the video communicates nothing to them, which is a larger group than the one that needs them for accessibility.

Automatic captions are a starting point and are frequently wrong on trade terminology, names and numbers. Correct them, because a wrong caption on a price or a measurement is worse than none.

Our page on captions and transcripts covers the requirements and why a transcript alongside serves both readers and anything reading the page.

Measure whether anybody watches

Most platforms report how many people started a video and how far they got. Those two numbers settle whether a video is earning the weight it costs, and almost nobody looks at them.

A video nobody starts is a decision to remove it. A video people start and abandon in the first ten seconds usually means the opening is wrong rather than the subject.

Then keep it current. A video showing a previous premises, an old vehicle livery or a member of staff who left is harder to update than a paragraph and ages just as badly.