Have you ever visited a website whose landing pages take ages to load? If you have, you might be familiar with the ordeal.
As a business, you want your landing pages to load as swiftly as possible and deliver a great user experience. You don’t want your users to abandon your landing just because it is slow to load and delivers a terrible user experience.
If that is exactly what you want, you should never use an auto playing video on landing pages.
Users have mixed feelings about auto playing videos. Some love them, some hate them. It depends on the situation they are used in.
Users like auto playing videos when they are watching a playlist of videos so the next video can play after the one they are currently watching.
They don’t like auto playing videos on home pages and even in their social media feeds, which is why you will find most users disabling these features on their social media profiles.
In this article, you will learn about six reasons why you should never use an auto playing video on landing pages.
Slow Page Load Time
Most users expect your web pages and landing pages to load three seconds or less. According to statistics, 57% of online shoppers will abandon a page if it fails to load in three seconds.
If that does not happen, they will abandon your website and might hop on to a competitor site to complete a purchase. As a business, you don’t want that.
Even search engines like Google consider page speed as a ranking factor. This means that if your website pages are slow to load, Google might penalize your business by pushing it down in its search index. This will have a negative impact on your online visibility, website traffic and conversions.
The problem with using auto playing videos on landing pages is that they are resource intensive. They are large and consume a lot of bandwidth and resources to load.
Even a short 30 second video can have file sizes in excess of 10 MB, which can drastically increase the size of the entire landing page. As a result, they take age to load. That is why digital agency never add videos on landing pages.
Poor User Experience
One of the direct consequences of slow page load time is poor user experience. When a user lands on your website, they want a lag free experience. They expect a fluid response.
If your website fails to deliver that, they are more likely to abandon your website. When you have an auto playing landing page video, that is exactly what happens. To deliver the best user experience, you need to get rid of extras and an auto playing video can be one of them.
Reduce the file sizes and make your website nimble so it can load instantly and respond to user inputs instantaneously. Minify your code, compress images and videos, and use a CDN to deliver a better experience to users.
You cannot expect your users to wait for pages to load and keep looking at the loading screen silently. They can easily hit the back button and look for other alternatives.
Less Control for Users
Imagine turning on your computer and seeing your mouse cursor being controlled by someone else. Similarly, a user will have similar experience if they land on your landing page and a video starts playing automatically.
Just like automatically moving a mouse cursor, they will feel that they do not have any control over what they want to watch and what they don’t.
Embedding an auto playing video on your landing page will give them a clear signal that it is the website owner who is calling all the shots and you have to see what they want you to see without having any control over it.
Increases Cognitive Load
Another downside of using an auto playing video on landing pages is that it increases the cognitive load. What exactly is cognitive load?
Is that what you are thinking? Cognitive load is basically a psychological metric which measures how much mental effort is required to perform a specific task.
Good user interfaces always reduce the cognitive load by making it easier for users to acquire the information they are looking for without much hassle.
The easier you make it for them to get the information they need, the longer they will stay on your website and the less likely they are to abandon your website.
Less Attention To Call To Action
When you include an auto playing video on a landing page, users will only pay attention to it and ignore everything else. As a business, you want your website visitor to pay attention to call to action and take the desired action.
This will not happen if you are including an auto playing video on your landing page. Even if you want to use a video, you can use an auto playing video on homepage but not on the landing page. You can not afford to lose your customer so deep into the funnel.
Kills The Purpose of Landing Page
Instead of making your landing page stand out, adding an auto playing video diverts all the attention away from your landing page.
Users will just watch the video and close the landing page or even worst close the landing page even without watching the video.
This kills the main purpose of having the landing page, which is to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. As a business, you don’t want your prospects to abandon your landing page after watching a video.
You want your website visitors to take the desired action, which would only happen when they pay attention to call to action and other elements on the landing page.
Do you use auto playing videos on landing pages? If yes, why? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.