Full background video

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  allisonmsanders · Member · Nov 4, 2018 at 12:24 pm

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  Hello, my company is currently using Squarespace for our website, and we’re interested to move it here to WordPress.
  First, I have a question about features we’d like to have:
  On the main page, we’d like there to be a full background video that begins automatically when someone loads the page (ex. like this page: https://www.sdgbusinessforum.org). This hasn’t worked from Squarespace, though we’ve already contacted their service support – they said it’s just a platform issue that is especially bad in Google Chrome, and sometimes doesn’t load in general.

  With WordPress, is it possible to have a full background video that loads automatically (and quickly) as soon as the page loads? Or might there be some issues?

  For our current Squarespace account, the video is hosted on Vimeo and embedded in the page.

  Thanks very much for your help,
  Allison

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Nov 5, 2018 at 2:26 pm

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  Hi there,

  On the main page, we’d like there to be a full background video that begins automatically when someone loads the page

  You’d need to have a theme that supports this. The only WordPress.com themes I can think of off the top of my head that have almost full-page backgrounds are Twenty Seventeen and Swell:

  https://wordpress.com/theme/twenty-seventeen

  https://wordpress.com/theme/swell

  I say “almost” because the video only appears in the header area of the screen, but on initial page load that should take up the entire screen depending on the video’s dimensions.

  However, there are thousands of WordPress themes out there, and I’m sure there are ones where the video forms the background of the entire page itself. To use a third party theme you’d need to be on our Business Plan, though.

  they said it’s just a platform issue that is especially bad in Google Chrome, and sometimes doesn’t load in general.

  This is not wrong. All the big browsers are making changes to block auto-playing video and audio on websites, with specific emphasis on audio. How exactly it affects a theme would probably depend on how exactly the theme handles the video, but you should aware this type of blocking is only going to become more common, not less.

  Mobile browser also don’t support video backgrounds as used in the two themes I mentioned – the browsers are simply not built to recognise the code used to make that work – which is why any well-designed theme will always give you the option to set a fallback image that will display instead of the video in cases where the video cannot be loaded.