Using video on your website

Video can be a powerful tool on a website — explaining a service, introducing your team, demonstrating a product, or sharing client testimonials. But video also has the potential to slow your site down, autoplay with unwanted sound, and exclude people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

This guide covers how to add video well.

Where to host your videos

Do not upload video files directly to your website's hosting. Video files are enormous compared to images. A single unoptimized video can be hundreds of megabytes — enough to dramatically slow your site and hit storage limits.

Instead, host your video on a dedicated video platform and embed it on your site. The two most common options:

YouTube

• Free to use
• Very fast delivery worldwide
• Automatically generates captions (which you should review and correct)
• Shows related videos after playback (some clients find this distracting)
• Uses your YouTube account — if you don't have a brand channel set up, content will appear under a personal account

Vimeo

• Paid plans for professional use (basic free plan has limits)
• Cleaner, ad-free player
• More control over the appearance
• No related videos after playback
• Often preferred for higher-end brand presentation

We can discuss which is right for your project during setup.

How to embed a video

Once your video is uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo, you get an embed code — a snippet that you paste into your web page. On WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, and similar platforms, you can usually paste the video URL directly into a video block and the embedding happens automatically.

If you're unsure how to embed a video on your specific platform, let us know and we'll do it for you.

Captions: required for accessibility

Captions display spoken words as text on screen. They are essential for:

• People who are deaf or hard of hearing
• People watching in noisy or quiet environments (captions are used by far more people than those with hearing loss)
• Non-native speakers
• Anyone whose browser plays video without audio by default

Under WCAG 2.1 AA, captions are required for all prerecorded video with audio.

YouTube auto-captions: YouTube automatically generates captions, but they often contain errors — especially for names, industry terms, and accents. Always review and correct auto-captions before treating them as accessible.

How to edit YouTube captions: In YouTube Studio, open the video, select Subtitles, and edit the auto-generated captions directly.

Vimeo captions: Vimeo allows you to upload a caption file (SRT format) or use their auto-caption feature on paid plans.

Transcripts

A transcript is the full written text of a video's content. It is separate from captions and provides:

• Full accessibility for people who can't access the video at all
• SEO value (Google can read and index text — it cannot fully read video)
• A quick-scan reference for people who prefer reading

Place the transcript on the same page as the video, or link to it immediately below.

Autoplay: use it carefully

Video that autoplays with sound is startling and unwelcome to most visitors. It is also a WCAG accessibility failure — users must be able to stop or mute media that plays automatically.

If you autoplay a video:

• Mute it by default
• Provide controls so users can pause it
• Keep it short (under 30 seconds)

Background video loops are common in hero sections. They should always autoplay muted.

Keeping videos short

Attention drops sharply after 2 minutes for most web video content. Keep homepage videos under 90 seconds. Keep tutorial videos focused on one topic. If a topic needs more than 5 minutes, consider splitting it into multiple shorter videos.

Common questions

Related guides

• Web accessibility basics
• Accessible content checklist
• Images & page speed
• How to embed a video in WordPress

Learn more

• WCAG 2.1 — captions (prerecorded) Success Criterion 1.2.2
• WebAIM — captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions