Can You Really Cut Video Load Times by 50%? We Tried It

Developers often find themselves caught between two priorities: delivering high-quality, videos that autoplay to increase engagement and meeting performance goals for fast load times and strong Core Web Vitals. That tradeoff becomes hard to ignore when video makes up the largest share of page weight.

In 2022, video accounted for 82% of all internet traffic, but only 43% of websites met Core Web Vitals benchmarks. Over the past decade, average page sizes have increased by nearly 600 percent, and unoptimized video is a major reason.

This guide walks through how our team used Cloudinary’s Video API and transformation tools to reduce video load times, cut bandwidth usage, and improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), all without sacrificing visual quality.

Here’s what the optimized implementation delivered:

• 67% reduction in video load times.
• 45% improvement in LCP.
• 52% less bandwidth usage.

If you’re working on video-heavy websites or applications, measurable optimization can improve the user experience. During our tests, we found that using the Cloudinary Video API and taking advantage of its built-in transformation tools helped videos load faster and improved page performance overall. That’s a big win for most projects.

Why Video Optimization is Critical

Web projects have grown complex and larger in size over the past decade. As customers continue to demand rich video experiences, software teams often don’t have the resources for optimizing that content. Video content can represent 60% of page size and, if not properly optimized, it can bottleneck performance.

Our team's experience using the Cloudinary API to optimize video content addresses three critical questions that developers hear constantly:

• What’s the measurable impact on Core Web Vitals?
• Can automated optimization maintain visual quality while reducing bandwidth?
• How do you prove ROI to justify video optimization investment?

To answer these questions and measure the results, we first needed to set up a testing framework. In the next section, we’ll go through an overview of the project’s baseline performance and how it improved using the Cloudinary API and its available video optimization options.

A Quick Overview of the Video Optimization Test Results

To understand the real impact of video optimization, we ran a series of performance tests and tracked key metrics. Here’s a brief summary of how the setup was done and the tools used to measure results.

Baseline Configuration

For the testing, we combined PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse. PageSpeed Insights measures Core Web Vitals, which directly impact the user experience. These analyses tend to give you better insight into a website’s overall performance, rather than just its loading time. With Lighthouse, we can test applications using the PageSpeed Insights service from the command line.

First, we set up a baseline using Cloudinary’s standard video delivery, without optimizations. This way, we could measure the impact of each transformation:

<!-- Baseline: No optimization -->

<video controls width="1280" height="720">

  <source src="https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/video/upload/sample-video.mp4" type="video/mp4">

</video>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)        

My Baseline Metrics (Averaged Across 10 Test Runs)

• File Size: 11.3MB
• LCP: 4.2 seconds
• Load Time: 6.8 seconds
• Bandwidth: Full original resolution

Results: What the Data Shows

Overall, the data shows that using the Cloudinary API to deliver video content can significantly reduce loading times and the strain on your servers. Let’s take a look at the results, first in terms of Core Web Vitals, and then bandwidth and loading metrics.

Get all the details and insights in our blog post: https://cloudinary.com/blog/can-you-really-cut-video-load-times-by-50?utm_campaign=4898-&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=marketo&utm_content=sept-cust-nl&mkt_tok=Nzk2LVhXTC00OTYAAAGctEHVGMyymBxeIwlSsjTITFGJguZNJo9L2nmbDLlMUDv-SAw6D-Z8AKKxx5cdTFuJuiGk-4P9bn_UH-vSjYX6rXKd9vYT5p4Y1VjHDS0Unkm7