Videos That Autoplay on Mobile Data

The homepage video

It is the single most common expensive decision on a small business site.

A short loop behind the headline: a workshop, a team, a drone shot of a building. It looks current, it was expensive to shoot, and everybody in the meeting liked it.

On a desktop with a good connection it is genuinely effective.

On a phone, on mobile data, it is the reason somebody left before the page finished appearing.

What it actually costs the visitor

A background loop of a few seconds, at a quality that does not look poor, is commonly between two and eight megabytes.

A longer video that plays through is often twenty or more.

That is downloaded before the visitor has read a word, decided anything, or indicated any interest in watching it.

On a limited plan it is a measurable fraction of a monthly allowance, spent on a decoration they did not request and frequently cannot see clearly on a small screen.

Why you never notice

The same reason most performance problems persist in businesses that care.

You look at the site on office wifi, on a desktop, with the video already cached from the last twenty times you loaded the page.

It appears instantly and looks excellent.

Nobody in the building has ever experienced the version a customer gets on two bars of signal in a car park, and there is no report that tells you about it, because the people affected simply leave.

What the browser does about it

Browsers have already imposed limits, which is worth knowing because it changes what a video can achieve.

Video with sound will not start on its own. That was settled some years ago after autoplaying audio became intolerable, and any video that plays automatically is muted.

Some browsers also decline to autoplay at all on metered connections or in low power mode.

So a proportion of your visitors are downloading a video that never plays, which is the worst possible outcome: the full cost and none of the effect.

Who it hurts most

• Anybody on a limited data plan, which is most people.
• Rural visitors, where connections are slower and caps are lower.
• Anybody on an older phone, where decoding video drains the battery.
• Visitors in a hurry, who leave before the page settles.
• People who pay per gigabyte, including those roaming.

These overlap heavily with the customers of most local trades and services, which is the uncomfortable part.

A worked example

A construction firm had a nine-second aerial loop behind their homepage headline, weighing about six megabytes.

Their homepage took roughly eleven seconds to become usable on a simulated mobile connection, and the video accounted for most of it.

They replaced it with a single still frame taken from the same footage, weighing under two hundred kilobytes, with a play control beside it for anybody who wanted the full clip.

The page became usable in under three seconds.

Over the following two months, twenty-nine people pressed play out of several thousand visitors, which is roughly one in a hundred.

Enquiries from the homepage rose. The video had been shown to everybody, watched by almost nobody, and paid for by all of them.

The still frame is usually enough

Most of what a background video contributes is a single strong image, and a still gets almost all of that at a fraction of the cost.

Pull a good frame from the footage you already have, or shoot a photograph of the same scene.

Put a play control on it if the video is worth watching, so the decision belongs to the visitor.

This also solves the problem of the video that will not autoplay on some devices, since the still is the design rather than a fallback for it.

If you are going to autoplay anyway

There are ways to do it that are less damaging, and they are worth applying.

Keep it short, a few seconds rather than thirty, and compress it hard, since a background loop at reduced quality is barely distinguishable behind text.

Serve a still image instead of the video below a certain screen width, so phones never receive it at all.

Make sure a poster image appears immediately, so the space is filled while the video loads rather than showing an empty block.

And load the video after the rest of the page rather than alongside it, so the text and the contact details are usable first.

Hosted elsewhere is not free

Embedding from a video platform rather than hosting the file yourself moves the bandwidth cost off your server and does nothing for the visitor.

They still download the video. They also download the platform's player, its scripts, and usually its tracking, which on some platforms is heavier than the video would have been.

Where an embed is the right answer, most platforms offer a lighter mode, and loading the player only when somebody clicks a still image is a well-established pattern that removes the cost entirely for the ninety-nine percent who do not.

The counter-case

Video earns its weight in some situations, and this is not an argument against video.

A demonstration where seeing the thing move is the point, a process that is hard to describe in text, or a product whose scale and operation cannot be photographed usefully.

Some audiences also arrive expecting it, and a site selling a visual service without any moving footage can look underpowered.

The distinction is between video somebody chose to watch and video imposed on everybody. A page where the visitor presses play is serving them. A page that starts downloading before they have read the headline is not, however good the footage is.

What to do

1. Load your homepage on a phone, on mobile data, with the cache cleared.
2. Check the video's file size in your browser's network view.
3. Replace autoplay with a still and a play control.
4. Serve no video at all below a phone-sized screen.
5. Load the player only on click for embedded video.
6. Count how many people press play after a month.

The last step usually settles the argument without anybody having to win it.

The sound version of this problem is covered in autoplay sound and the back button.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.