Videos and Personal Images

@adriyoga Thanks for getting in touch!

Videos and images uploaded for Web Stories are stored in your WordPress Media Library, just like images and videos that upload for blog posts and other content throughout your WordPress site. The impact that this storage will have on your website’s speed depends on a variety of factors, including your hosting provider and what hosting package you have.

There are ways to store media content outside of WordPress but still be able to use it in your Web Stories and other WordPress content types through the Media Library. This is commonly called “offloading,” and you can find more information about it via Google search. Essentially, offloading allows you to use the WordPress Media Library as usual, but actually store the media on a different server. There are WordPress plugins available that can connect your site to your offloaded storage. Note that this would require purchasing storage elsewhere in addition to have your WordPress site.

Setting up file offloading falls outside of the scope of the Web Stories plugin and our support, but there are lots of great resources out there about how to do it.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

@adriyoga One thing to note that I forgot to mention: in the newest version of the plugin (v1.60.0), we’ve enabled a video optimization feature by default. This feature automatically optimizes and compresses videos that are uploaded to the Media Library within the Web Stories Editor. We’re also working on adding a feature that allows you to click a button in the Web Stories Editor to optimize a video that was previously uploaded to your Library.

For context, the optimization feature does significantly compress videos – in our testing, a 37 MB file became 4 MB.

Let me know if have any other questions on this. Thank you!

@adriyoga Following up here as we’re working through some options on storing videos and I wanted to hear your thoughts.

In the past few months, we have implemented to new features to address concerns around video hosting bandwidth:

1. Video Optimization –?Videos uploaded to the Media Library within the Web Stories Editor are automatically optimized, and you also now have the option to optimize a video that was previously uploaded in the Media Library. In our testing, a 50MB video is reduced to <1MB in file size, about the same size as a high-res image.
2. With the new Video Cache option, which can be turned in Web Stories > Settings > Video Cache, your site will automatically serve videos from Google’s servers (instead of your own) which should eliminate bandwidth costs for most videos.

With these new features, have your concerns about video bandwidth addressed? Or do you also still want the ability to upload videos elsewhere and link to them within Web Stories? If so, why?

We’d really appreciate any feedback here – we want to make sure that the updates that we’ve made or plan to make will directly address your needs.

Thanks so much!

@adriyoga I’m going to mark this topic as resolved, but if you do have any other questions about Web Stories, feel free to open a new topic. Thank you!