Apr 12, 2018

Wix Designers Tip: Wix Video Backgrounds on Mobile

As a Wix Designer, I get this question a lot: "Why don't my videos play on mobile?" Video can be handled in one of two ways on Wix – you can use it as a video background, or you can embed videos using the Wix Video app, or embed YouTube or Vimeo or Facebook video players.

Video backgrounds: These are great as they auto-play on desktop computers, giving the website movement, however if you use video backgrounds on Wix (or any website for that matter), they won’t play on mobile (videos also don’t have sound if used as a video background). In Wix, if you use background videos for strips or page backgrounds, it will just take the first Image Still of the video and display that on mobile.

Embedded Video: You can display videos that play on both desktop and mobile if you use regular video embedding with Wix, such as Wix Video, Youtube, Facebook or Vimeo embedding. However, these video apps are not background videos and therefore will not be able to be displayed at a scaling full screen or as background elements that fill the page. These embedded videos won’t auto-play either, but there will be a play button for mobile users to click to play. No video auto-plays on mobile on any websites due to data-bandwidth limitations of mobile, they don’t want videos auto-playing on websites as it takes a lot of bandwidth!

Here's an example of an embedded YouTube video using Wix's easy to use video embedding app (you simply paste the URL link of the YouTube video desired to embed, and Wix does the rest of the work for you):

Animated Gifs work on Mobile! You could, as an alternative, use animated gifs, like the bee image below, which DO show up on mobile. :) But they can be quite large in filesize if they are large (for use as backgrounds) or if there is a lot of movement/frames.