Nevertheless, videos within your site should not be overlooked for explaining your products and for making an emotional connection with your visitors. Videos are absolutely indispensable for many products. For example: UpCart. And of course, you can effectively place videos anywhere that requires a click to play as opposed to an autoplay. Most of the time, It is better to not surprise a visitor by autoplaying a video when the page opens, unless the page is clearly a page where you can expect to see a video. For example, the NFL highlights page. Opinions vary on the best placement of video.

How do I put a video on my site?

Anyone can add video to their website. However, with all the hardware platforms we use today, it can take considerable expertise to optimize code to efficiently and correctly serve a video with self-hosting. For example, the GoPro example is self-hosted and provides the video in three formats (mp4, webm, and ogv) in order to provide support for different browser environments. In addition, even short videos can run into megabytes of data and you can quickly hit limits for web traffic set by your host server.

For most website owners, the best option is to use a third party video server like YouTube, Wistia, or Vimeo.YouTube is free for an unlimited number of videos and Wistia and Vimeo have free options. You simply upload your video to one of these video servers and they will provide you with the code to place on your site. The video will stream to your site without counting against your server's traffic limits.