A moving video is a great way to capture visitors' attention and show off your church life to potential visitors. At the same time, if you're not careful, a poor homepage video can ruin your visitors' website experience.
Here are a few tips to make sure your homepage video is well-optimized, engaging, and a useful tool on your website!
You can set a video background on any of our MereChurch templates, but this guide is useful even if you're using a different platform to build your church website.
1. File size < 2 megabytes
Before anything else on your site can load, your visitors will have to download this video on their internet connection. That may be stable home internet, or it may be a flaky mobile connection. Because of this, we want to make sure that your video is as small as possible, so that your visitors don't have to wait a long time to see the rest of your site.
The ideal video size is at or around 1 megabyte. That's usually about 5-10 seconds of highly-compressed video. You could consider going up to 2 megabytes, but anything higher than that will highly negatively affect your website performance.
If the compression is too noticeable, you can consider adding a mild translucent overlay to the whole hero section, to help draw attention away from any compression artifacts (all of our MereChurch themes feature this overlay out of the box).
2. Focus on "living" shots
While drone shots of a church building may look impressive, they don't do anything to tell visitors about what attending your church actually feels like.
Instead of focusing on building shots, try to pick out shots that show people: worshipping, interacting, and fellowshipping together. Consider this video a collection of shots that show what being at your church really looks like. This is your chance to give visitors a brief peek into a window of everyday life in your church.
3. Unobtrusive transitions
By default, your video on the homepage will loop. Avoid long transitions between shots, or a fade to black at the beginning or end of the video. That's not necessary — the end of the video will just jump directly back to the beginning, so make sure those two shots work together.
If you are only including a single long shot in your looping video, make sure that the beginning and end line up nicely together without any distracting jumps or jarring transitions. You might even consider a crossfade of the two shots to make sure the transition is seamless.
(If you're using our MereChurch themes and don't have access to a videographer, some of our themes offer a 'slideshow' option for your hero. With this option, you can load up 4-5 quality images and the theme will slideshow through them. This is a lower-effort way to achieve a similar effect as a homepage video).
If you are a Mere client and have any other questions about making the perfect homepage video, please get in touch! We are here to serve.
In Summary:
- Keep homepage videos below two megabytes in size. One megabyte is ideal.
- Avoid shots of buildings in your video: focus on people and church life.
- Consider your transitions in the video, particularly at the beginning and end of the video, since most hero backgrounds loop.