ChatBuildDoes your website need video?
The most over-recommended thing on a small business site — in two places, the cheapest win.
Video is the most over-recommended thing on a small business website. It is also, in two specific places, the cheapest improvement you can make.
The trick is knowing which two.
Where video genuinely earns its place
Showing something words struggle with. A treatment, a workshop, a space, a process with steps. If a customer's real question is "what is this actually like", thirty seconds answers it better than three paragraphs.
Being a face before the first meeting. For anything where someone will be alone in a room with you — a coach, a physiotherapist, a hairdresser, a consultant — a short introduction lowers the barrier to booking more than any amount of copy about your approach.
That is the list. Everything else is usually a slower version of text.
Where it costs you
On the homepage, playing automatically. It delays the page, it competes with the sentence explaining what you do, and on a phone it eats data the visitor did not agree to spend.
As the only place information lives. A video with your prices in it is a video nobody can scan, search cannot read, and a deaf visitor cannot use. Anything factual belongs in text, with the video alongside.
When it is three years old. Stale video ages far more visibly than stale text, because clothes, premises and phone quality all date it at once.
What good enough looks like
Shorter and rougher than people think. Thirty to sixty seconds, shot on a recent phone in daylight, tripod or steady surface, and — the part people skip — a clip-on microphone. Viewers forgive imperfect pictures and abandon bad sound.
Write three sentences before filming: who you are, what you do, what they should do next. That is the script.
The parts that matter and get skipped
- Captions. Most people watch without sound, and captions are also what makes the content readable to search and to someone who cannot hear it.
- A still image that carries the meaning, in case the video never plays.
- Never autoplay with sound. It is the fastest way to make someone close a tab.
- Host it somewhere that does not slow the page — a video platform's embed, loaded only when clicked, rather than a large file served by your site.
Video is content, not construction. Sending a new video to your ChatBuild site is one message, so a clip can be replaced when your premises change rather than living on for three years because replacing it is a project. How changes work.
Start with one
Do not plan a video strategy. Record one introduction, put it on the page where people decide whether to contact you, add captions, and leave the homepage alone.
If enquiries mention it, make a second. If nobody notices, you have spent an afternoon and learned something — which is more than most video budgets achieve.
Related: video is one trust signal among several, and the others are cheaper. If it slows the page down, test that first.
Frequently asked
- How long should a website video be?
- Thirty to sixty seconds for an introduction. Longer only when you are demonstrating a process someone genuinely wants to watch, and even then it is better split into short clips than left as one long file nobody finishes.
- Does video slow my website down?
- A video file served from your own site will. An embed from a video platform that loads only after someone clicks will not, because nothing heavy downloads until it is wanted. Check the page speed either way.
Sjors Hooijen Builds ChatBuild and writes about getting a business online without turning it into a project. Questions about this article? Email hi@chatbuild.com.