Video is a great way to engage your audience, but if it is implemented improperly it can drastically increase a pages load time. Page load time is a key factor for search engine ranking. It is best not to have a video set to auto play. This can start the streaming process right away and cause the page to load much slower. To combat this we load all videos with a lightweight cover image and a click to play feature. This starts the streaming after the page has loaded saving valuable time.

We have also adopted the practice of converting all videos to .FLV Format to reduce the file size and speed up load times. We currently use Flowplayer as our video player on all projects. Flowplayer is easy to set up and they have a free version that is allowed for commercial use.

We use Amazon Web Services to host all of our client's videos. The reason for this is it takes away the strain and bandwidth that streaming videos can have on a web server. The Amazon Web Servers are built for this service and have the bandwidth to make everything fast and simple.

Using Amazon Web Services to host your videos is a fairly simple process. We like CloudBerry Explorer as a management tool.