What is NitroPack's Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos for WordPress?

 

Self-hosting your WordPress videos offers the ultimate in control. You get a seamless, ad-free experience that perfectly matches your branding, without sending your visitors to another platform. 

But… 

This control often comes with a severe, hidden cost: a massive drop in performance.

Videos are heavyweight assets, and loading them inefficiently can bring even the most well-built website to a crawl. 

The median page requests 194 KB of video for desktop users, and surprisingly, a larger 299 KB for mobile users. Source: Web Almanac 2024

But what if you could have the best of both worlds—the control of self-hosting and the speed of a fully optimized site?

This is what NitroPack’s Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos feature has to offer.

Read on to learn more! 

The Heavy Performance Cost of Self-Hosted Videos

When a browser loads a webpage, it "eagerly" tries to download every single resource it finds in the code right away. This includes every image, every script, and, most importantly, every large video file. 

It does this regardless of whether the visitor can even see the video yet, such as one located at the bottom of a long page.

For self-hosted videos, this is a performance disaster that leads to several critical issues:

• Bloated Page Weight: A single video file can be several megabytes. Eager loading forces this entire weight onto the initial page load, dramatically slowing it down.
• Wasted Bandwidth: Your visitors, especially those on mobile devices with limited data plans, are forced to download huge files they may never even scroll down to watch.
• Poor Core Web Vitals: This process directly harms your site's performance scores. If a video is the largest element visible when the page first loads (above the fold), its slow load time will lead to a poor Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score. It also damages Interaction to Next Paint (INP), as the browser's main thread gets blocked downloading the video, making the page unresponsive to user clicks and taps.

In short, the very act of self-hosting a video sets you on a collision course with poor performance. 

The browser's default behavior works directly against your goal of a fast, responsive site, forcing you into a difficult choice: 

1. sacrifice the control of self-hosting
2. or sacrifice the user experience

But what if you didn't have to choose?

Enter Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos by NitroPack.
 

How Does Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos By NitroPack Work?

Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos is a feature that fundamentally changes how your videos are loaded. Instead of the browser's default "eager loading," it uses "lazy loading." This means it intelligently defers the loading of any self-hosted HTML video element until the user is about to scroll it into view. The browser only downloads the heavy video file when it's actually needed.

While embedding videos from platforms like YouTube is often recommended for performance, it's not always the right choice. Sometimes, for branding, business, or content reasons, you need to self-host.

This is where NitroPack's feature becomes essential. It provides the perfect solution to have both self-hosted videos and excellent performance.

With and Without Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos (Example)

The difference between the default behavior and lazy loading is night and day.

Loading Method	What Happens	Result
Eager Loading (Default)	The browser loads all page content, including the heavy self-hosted video file, at the very beginning.	A slow initial load, high LCP, and a sluggish feel.
Lazy Loading (NitroPack)	The browser loads the self-hosted video only when the visitor scrolls near it.	A lightning-fast initial load, low LCP and INP scores, and a responsive experience.

The Benefits of Lazy Loading Videos

By letting your page load the optimized way, you're not just making small tweaks—you're fundamentally transforming the visitor experience from the very first moment.

You eliminate that frustrating initial delay where a blank screen greets the user, replacing it with the instant gratification of a fast, professional site that values their time. Specifically, this transformation delivers:

• An Instant First Impression: Your page's visible content appears immediately, directly improving your LCP score and creating the feeling of a high-performance site.
• A Fluid, Interactive Experience: With the main thread unblocked, your site responds instantly to clicks and taps, leading to a better INP score and eliminating user frustration.
• A Respectful Mobile Experience: You stop forcing visitors on mobile connections to download massive video files they may never see, saving their data and showing respect for their resources.

Ultimately, you get to achieve your content goals without making a technical compromise. You can keep using powerful, self-hosted videos to tell your story, confident that the user experience remains seamless and fast—all without writing a single line of code.

How to Enable Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos

Activating this powerful feature takes just a few seconds:

1. Log in to your NitroPack Dashboard.
2. Go to Cache Settings >> Images & Media.
3. Toggle on Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Does this work for YouTube or Vimeo videos? 

No. This feature is specifically designed for self-hosted videos—those uploaded to your WordPress Media Library and embedded with the video tag. NitroPack has separate optimizations for embedded videos.

Will users see a blank space where the video should be? 

No. A lightweight placeholder, often the video's first frame (poster image), is loaded initially. The full video loads seamlessly as the user scrolls, so there is no jarring empty space.

Should I use this for videos at the top of my page (above the fold)?

It's highly recommended to disable lazy loading for videos that are visible without scrolling. LCP measures how quickly the largest visible element loads. If that element is a video, you want it to load immediately, not be deferred. Lazy loading is for content that is "below the fold."

Is Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos available on all plans?

Lazy Load Self-Hosted Videos is available on our Plus, Pro, and Agency plans.