Our Video Player Just Got a Lot Faster: Introducing Vulcan V2

If you’ve been paying attention, you know how important we believe the speed of a video player is.

And why wouldn’t we, when Google recently published a study that found as page load time goes from one second to five seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 90%. Makes sense intuitively, right? Who’s got the time for that?

Page speed also matters for SEO. For nearly a decade, Google’s been using it as a signal for desktop search rankings, and starting in July of 2018, page speed will factor into mobile rankings, as well.

Because we’re marketers who love video, this has always been a tricky balance. Video is an amazing tool to connect with your audience, but it also adds a lot of heft to your site and slows down page load times.

That’s why we’re super excited to announce our brand new player, Vulcan V2. At 99KB, Vulcan V2 is half the size of our previous player and less than a quarter the size of YouTube’s player.

A smaller player (plus the tons of optimizations Luke mentions in the video) means your pages load faster — 10% faster, in fact. That’s right: We’re seeing pages with Vulcan V2 load 10% faster on average than those with our previous player.

“We’re seeing pages with Vulcan V2 load 10% faster on average than those with our previous player.”

We’ve quietly been rolling out these updates over the last month, and we’re pleased to announce that as of today, Vulcan V2 is fully live to all Wistia users. No settings to change, no embeds to update: just a faster, smaller video player.

If you add up all of these speed improvements in the context of every Wistia-hosted video, Vulcan V2 is collectively saving viewers of Wistia videos a total of five years of page loading time every month. (Coincidentally, that’s about how long it would take to watch everything on Netflix — yes, including credits.)