Page speed plays a crucial role in user experience and conversions. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom can measure load times, but their benchmarks can be misleading—especially when analyzing modern video players like Vidalytics.

The Vidalytics player is optimized for real-world performance, not arbitrary benchmark scores.
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That said, here are general best practices and specific tips to help you optimize your site’s performance.

Modern video players use:

Speed-test tools do not fully understand this behavior.
They assume that if something is still downloading, the page is “not finished loading,” which is not correct.

When autoplay is enabled on a video:

However, the player is ready for your visitors much earlier than when these tools mark the page as “fully loaded.”

For tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom, focus on Onload Time, not “Fully Loaded Time”:

Everything after Onload Time is mostly background video activity.

Smart Autoplay in Vidalytics is designed to make your video start as smoothly as possible, regardless of browser restrictions:

Because of this, the player may begin loading earlier or in a different pattern than traditional speed-test tools expect, often leading to misleading performance scores.

When a video begins playing, the player downloads small video segments:

This is standard behavior for all modern streaming platforms (YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo, etc.).
These segments:

Speed-test tools, however, count these background requests as if the page is “still loading,” which is not how real users experience the site.

Even if GTmetrix or Lighthouse reports a long Fully Loaded Time, your visitor already sees:

In other words, real-world experience is fast — synthetic tools simply misinterpret background streaming activity.

Most speed tools are designed around pages with:

They are not designed for live video streaming and tend to penalize any ongoing streaming activity — even when it has zero impact on real users.

In practice, most slowdowns are caused by other elements on the page, not the video player.

These often cause the biggest delays:

They often:

Platforms like:

Ship with large built-in scripts and CSS bundles that cannot be fully removed.
These typically affect startup speed far more than a video player embed.

Google officially recommends optimizing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) images.

Guidelines:

Large hero images are one of the most common causes of poor LCP scores.

Even well-designed pages can include:

These issues typically impact perceived performance more than a video embed.

If your server has:

Then the entire page will feel slower.
This is a hosting/performance issue, not a video issue.

These recommendations apply broadly to most websites.

This often improves real-world performance immediately.

A CDN can help deliver:

from locations geographically closer to your visitors, reducing latency.

Google recommends:

These improvements benefit all pages, not just those with videos.

If you have several Vidalytics videos on the same page, use the Multiple Videos embed option.
This prevents duplicate script loading and improves performance.

See:
​Multiple Videos Embed Guide

On multi-page websites, using the Global Script can:

This can slightly improve overall perceived performance.

For clean, accurate synthetic test results:

Vidalytics offers a Fastest (Low Quality) startup option:

Use this mode carefully, as it lowers video quality for the first few seconds of playback.

A facade shows a static thumbnail image and loads the actual player only when clicked.

Google Lighthouse directly recommends this for third-party resources, see:
​Lazy load third-party resources with facades – Chrome Developers

Benefits:

If you’d like help reviewing your specific page, interpreting your speed-test results, or applying these optimizations, you can always contact Customer Happiness Team at [email protected].