Should video go on your homepage?

The home page is the page merchants most want to put video on and the page where it most often disappoints. Both facts have the same cause: it is a page with a very short window and a very unclear audience.

What a home page is for

Two jobs, and they pull in different directions. It has to tell a first-time visitor what this store is, and it has to get a returning visitor to the thing they came back for. Most home pages are built almost entirely for the first and then wonder why returning customers bounce.

Video is very good at the first job and actively unhelpful at the second.

The hero video question

A full-width autoplaying video behind the headline looks like a brand that has its act together. Three things to weigh before doing it:

• It is usually your largest element, which means it is usually what your loading performance is measured on. A slow hero video is a slow home page, and a slow home page loses people before the video has said anything.
• It plays muted, so whatever the sound was carrying is gone.
• It cannot be tapped into a purchase. A hero video is decoration — good decoration, possibly, but not a route to a product.

If you want one, keep it short, keep it small, and do not put the headline’s meaning inside it.

The placement that actually earns

A row of shoppable video cards, below the hero, above or instead of the “featured products” grid.

It works because it does the first job and the second at once. A new visitor learns what the store sells and what it feels like. A returning one gets a fast route into products. And unlike a hero, every card is tappable into something buyable.

How many videos

Six to eight in a carousel. Attention falls off a cliff after the third or fourth, so anything past eight is storage rather than merchandising.

Choose them for range, not for quality ranking. Six videos of the same category tells a visitor the store sells one thing. Six across your actual categories tells them what you are.

What to put in the first card

The video that best answers “what is this store?” — not necessarily your best-performing video on social. The first card is doing positioning work; the ones after it are doing merchandising work.

When to skip it

If your home page is already long, already slow, or already has three competing sections fighting for the same attention, adding video will not help. Fix the page first. Video amplifies whatever the page is already doing, including being cluttered.