Video on a trade website: short, silent, useful

Video on websites is growing: the share of mobile pages with at least one video element rose by 32 percent in relative terms compared with the previous survey (Web Almanac 2024). For a trade business that is neither an instruction nor an argument. The question is not whether others use video, but whether in your case it explains something that text and images do not. Motion, sound and sequence are the three things only a video carries. Everything else - prices, availability, service area, past work - reads faster and more reliably as text on the page.

That leads to an uncomfortable restriction: a corporate film showing the premises from outside, panning across the van fleet and ending on the logo usually explains nothing at all. It costs load time, production effort and attention, and answers none of the questions that brought someone to the page. A 40-second clip in which a fitter shows what the consumer unit looks like after the rebuild and where the fuses now sit answers a very specific question.

It pays to write down the division of labour between text, photo and video before the first recording. The table below is the starting point we use in projects; it can be adapted for any trade.

Taken seriously, that table leaves most businesses with two to four videos - not twenty. The rest stays a photo series, and that is no step backwards: how far good images carry on their own is shown in the article on websites for joineries, and how to produce the material without equipment is set out in the guide to phone photos for trade websites.

The analysis of attributes on video elements shows a striking mismatch: autoplay appears on 23 percent of elements, muted on only 8 percent, and a still image in the poster attribute on just 3 percent (Web Almanac 2024). Some pages mute their audio by other means, some simply try to start with sound. The result is familiar to anyone who has taken a phone out of their pocket in a waiting room.

Browsers have responded. Under the autoplay rules in Chrome, a muted automatic start is permitted, while an automatic start with sound is allowed only under additional conditions - for example if the person has already used the site before. A video that wants to start with sound is therefore treated differently depending on device and history. Anyone who needs the sound plans for a visible play button rather than for an automatic start.

On top of that come the requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If audio on a page plays automatically for more than 3 seconds, there must be a way to pause or stop it or to control its volume independently of the system volume (W3C). A related rule applies to moving content: anything that starts automatically, lasts more than five seconds and appears alongside other content needs a way to pause, stop or hide it (W3C). A silent background film without controls does not meet that.

The silent start is not a compromise but a design decision: a video that works without sound works everywhere. How often such self-starters appear together with other avoidable patterns is shown in the collection of common mistakes on trade websites.

Captions are the part that tends to be forgotten during the shoot and resented afterwards. The requirement is unambiguous: for prerecorded audio in synchronized media, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines require captions at Level A - the only exception being media that are themselves an alternative for text and are clearly labelled as such (W3C). Level A is the lowest level; there is nothing below it.

Videos with no sound at all fall under a separate rule: if a prerecorded film has no audio track, an alternative for time-based media or an audio track presenting the same information is required (W3C). In practice that means a silent process clip needs a short written description beside it saying the same thing. That is not a large job - three to five sentences will do - but somebody has to do it.

Planning captions from the start saves the rework. A narration script written beforehand is almost the caption file already: add timestamps, break the lines to a readable length, done. Which statutory requirements apply to trade businesses beyond that, and to whom they apply at all, is set out in the article on the accessibility act and trade businesses.

The raw material for short videos already exists in many businesses: footage from the site is produced anyway - for documentation, for coordination with the client, or simply because a work step looked good. The difference lies less in the raw material than in the selection. On your own site a video appears because it answers a question, and not because the working day happened to provide it - and that selection can only be made inside the business itself.

Four formats have proven to carry their weight in projects. They barely differ in how they are recorded, but clearly in the role they play on the page.

The same caution applies as with photos: other people's homes, names and recognisable faces need clearance before anything goes online. How to show work without naming clients is described in the article on showing past work without client names; where the team window pays off most is covered in the article on a trade careers page that works.

The position on the page decides the effect. On a service page the video belongs after the description of the service and before the enquiry option: anyone who has read that far is interested enough to click and finds the form immediately afterwards. On a project page it sits between the before and after images. On the homepage it sits, if at all, below the first screen.

The benefit can be judged without elaborate measurement. Three questions matter: is the play button pressed at all? Does the share of visitors who send an enquiry from that page rise? And do the questions the video answers come up less often on the phone? In a trade business the third question is typically answered most reliably by the office - after four to six weeks, not after three days.

Short, silent and useful is therefore not a matter of style but the summary of three measurable requirements: a length that gets watched to the end, a start that forces no sound, and a weight that does not slow the page down. The services we offer around structure, images and video are listed in the overview of our services.