Reducing a Homepage Demo Video from 11.6 MB to Under 1 MB

Yesterda I worked on a small homepage improvement that turned out to be more technical than expected. I wanted to add an autoplay product video to the "how it works" section of my SaaS homepage. The goal was simple: make the product flow easier to understand without adding too much friction or weight to the page. The problem was file size. My screen recording tool had already compressed the video, but the result was still too large for the web. One clip was only about 13 seconds long at 1280x720, H.264, and still came out to 11.6 MB. That felt far too heavy for a short homepage demo. At first I thought the issue was just resolution, but it turned out the bigger problem was delivery format. Even after the recording software compressed the file, it was still not really optimized for web use. So instead of relying on the recording tool's export alone, I treated that file as an intermediate version and ran it through ffmpeg. This is the command that gave me a very good result: ffmpeg -i "u