Should a service business use video on its website?

Ascent Vision · Published October 21, 2026

Yes, when it shows something text and photos cannot: the owner, the team at work or how a job goes. Keep it short, let visitors choose to press play, add captions to any speech, and keep the key facts in writing too. Video files are usually much heavier than photos, so check that your pages still load quickly on a phone before you add one.

When video helps

Video often suits things that move or are easier to show than to write. Nielsen Norman Group's 2014 article on video usability says video can show, for example, "how a product works". For a service business, good candidates are a short clip of the owner saying who they are, a job in progress and a walk through a first visit. These are general suggestions, not findings from the article.

What Nielsen Norman Group warns about

The article says visitors behave differently around video: some watch at once, some read first and some have no interest, so you cannot count on anyone watching. It adds that in its testing some videos would not load or froze. Its advice is to present any essential information from a video as text too. Its practical points include:

Avoid starting a video automatically; it can surprise visitors. Visitors should be able to start, stop, restart and mute it.
Edit it to be as short as possible and keep any introduction brief.
End with a next step, because many videos are dead ends.
If a video service offers to show suggested videos at the end, check whether you can turn that off; the article warns they can include your competitors' videos.

The cost in page weight

A video file is usually much larger than a photo, so a page with video can take longer to load, especially on a phone with a weak signal. Nielsen Norman Group's article notes that on mobile devices with variable network connectivity, a longer video also means a longer download.

The web.dev performance guide says services such as YouTube or Vimeo optimize delivery, but that an embedded player can often serve a lot of extra resources of its own. As a compromise, it describes showing a placeholder and loading the player only when a visitor interacts with it. It also says a video set to play automatically starts downloading immediately, even if it sits below the first screen. Questions for whoever runs your site:

Does the video load only when someone presses play?
Does the page still load quickly on a phone? The related answer on phones has a quick speed check.

Captions

Captions are a text version of the speech and other sounds needed to understand a video. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative says they serve people who are Deaf or cannot hear the audio, and people who process written information better than audio. They are not needed for a video with no audio, or one whose audio is not needed to understand it, such as background music. By that test, a clip of the owner talking needs captions.

W3C says automatic captions do not meet user needs unless confirmed fully accurate, can be wrong in ways that change the meaning, and usually need significant editing. Captions and transcripts contain the same text, so one can be built from the other, which also gives you the written version Nielsen Norman Group recommends. The related answer on website accessibility has a quick sound-off check.

Sources

Websites, upgraded or built

Most businesses do not need a new website. They need the one they have to load fast, say clearly what they do and ask the visitor to take one step.

See the service Work with us