A webmaster was concerned about YouTube downloads. Adding these videos negatively affected the load time of their page by increasing it significantly.
In this case, while YouTube had a substantial negative impact, standard MP4 videos did not. This webmaster’s question was whether or not they should abandon YouTube altogether in favor of MP4 videos.
John explained that he doesn’t think it makes sense to switch to an entirely different format just for SEO reasons. You can always use lazy loading to make the YouTube videos load faster. One example you could use would be to set up a placeholder image. Once someone clicks on it, then the YouTube video loads.
This usually results in a decrease in page load time.
He also recommended making sure that you add the structured data for these videos.
This occurs at the 29:11 mark in the video.
You can also read the transcript below:
John Mueller 09/10/2021 Hangout Transcript
We embed YouTube videos on our website; however, they significantly slowed down our page loading times according to PageSpeed Insights. Embedded mp4 videos do not slow down the page loading time at all. Therefore, for SEO, is it better to embed mp4 videos?
John (answer) 29:30
I don’t know. At least from kind of the normal ranking and search crawling, indexing ranking point of view, I don’t think it makes sense to like switch to a different video format just because of SEO reasons. If you’re looking at speed, obviously there are different ways of embedding videos and there can be different formats of videos that can be different ways of embedding the existing videos. And in particular, when it comes to YouTube there, there are ways to embed videos that use your kind of lazy loading, where you show, for example, a placeholder image if someone clicks on it, then it activates the video itself.
And if you set that up, then I think you should be able to set these pages up so that they actually load pretty quickly. I also know the YouTube team is working on improving the default embed, as well. So maybe over time, that will improve. But at least until then, I would look into different ways to just embed the same videos. And if you decide to host these videos yourselves, and just to put the mp4 files directly on your site, that’s, that’s also fine, that’s perfectly acceptable, up to you.
When it comes to videos, the thing I might watch out for is that Google is able to recognize the video metadata for it, for these things. And with normal YouTube embeds, usually, we can pull that out fairly well. If you’re embedding these yourselves or using a kind of a custom player to embed the videos, then I would double-check that you have the structured data for videos appropriately on your pages as well.
