9 months into the AetherHaus engagement, I made a decision that would sound insane to most premium brand owners: I banned video on every page of their site, current and future. Images only. No background loops. No autoplay hero clips. No exceptions.
The brand is a sauna and cold plunge studio in Vancouver. Beautiful product, beautiful interiors, the kind of business that screams for cinematic video on every landing page. And the video was killing them.
Not in a slow, theoretical Core Web Vitals way. In a real, infrastructure-eating, hosting-plan-blowing way. Bandwidth usage was climbing every month, page load on mobile was inconsistent, and the cost-per-visitor on the technical side was rising faster than the traffic was.
So the ban went into every contractor brief. Every new landing page, every blog header, every section build, the rule is the same: images only. That decision is part of the reason AetherHaus grew from roughly 40 monthly organic visitors to 4,800 in 9 months. 120x growth. 174 ranking keywords. 89 AI citations. Ranked #1 for "cold plunge Vancouver."
What the video was actually costing
When I run a technical audit on a new client, I look at 3 things before I look at content: render-blocking resources, the size of above-the-fold media, and whether the site is server-side rendered. Video backgrounds fail the second check almost every time.
A single hero video on a landing page is often 8-15 MB. Multiply that across a homepage, an experiences page, a journal index, and a few service pages, and you have a site where every visitor pulls down 40-80 MB just to look at the first viewport. Most of that data is decorative. None of it is read by Google. None of it is read by ChatGPT or any other AI crawler trying to characterise the brand.
Google's own data on this is brutal. Pages that take longer than 3 seconds to become interactive lose around 53% of mobile visitors before the page even finishes loading (Think with Google). And Core Web Vitals, specifically Largest Contentful Paint, are a confirmed ranking signal. A 12 MB hero video makes LCP very difficult to keep under 2.5 seconds, especially on the 4G connections most local searchers are using.
The math of "premium" media on a premium brand site
Here is the trap premium brands fall into. The brand team commissions cinematic video for the campaign. The agency builds it into the site as background loops because "the brand demands it." The site goes live, the brand looks incredible on a 5K monitor, and 6 months later the SEO numbers are flat, the hosting bill is rising, and nobody connects the two.
I have seen this on enough sites now to call it a pattern. The brands most likely to over-use background video are the ones whose entire positioning is sensory: wellness, hospitality, food and beverage, luxury real estate. The exact verticals where mobile traffic is highest, where local intent is highest, and where conversion rates are most sensitive to page speed.
Here is what the trade-off actually looks like once you put it in a table.
| Approach | Hero asset | Page weight | Mobile LCP target | What Google indexes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video background everywhere | 8-15 MB MP4 loop | 40-80 MB per page | Rarely under 4s | Alt text only, if present |
| Video on homepage, images elsewhere | 1 video, 10+ images | 15-25 MB homepage | 3-4s homepage, 1-2s rest | Image alt + filenames |
| Images only, optimised WebP | WebP, 150-300 KB | 1-3 MB per page | Under 2s | Image alt + filenames + faster crawl |
The third row is the only one that compounds. The first row actively works against the content strategy you're paying for.
Why the ban had to be total, not partial
I considered a partial rule first. Video on the homepage only. Video on hero sections but not body content. Lazy-loaded video below the fold.
None of those rules survive contact with a real team building real pages. Contractors interpret "sometimes" as "when it looks good." Designers interpret "only here" as "and also here, because this section is similar." 3 months in, the partial rule is broken on 60% of pages and nobody noticed because each individual exception felt reasonable.
Total bans are easier to enforce. "No video on AetherHaus pages, ever" goes into the contractor brief, into the Loom walkthrough I record for every new build, and into the Figma annotations. There is no judgement call. No exception process. The rule is the rule.
Sofiya, my co-founder, asked me early on whether this was overcorrecting. It is, slightly. There are individual pages where a short, well-optimised video would help conversion. But the cost of maintaining that nuance across 32 articles, 15 landing pages, and a team of contractors over 9 months is higher than the cost of losing a few percentage points of conversion lift on 2 or 3 pages. The total ban scales. The nuanced rule does not.
What replaces video, and why it works better than people expect
The substitute is not "static image instead of video." It is image-led design with motion handled by CSS, not video files. Subtle parallax on scroll. Crossfade between high-quality stills. Ken Burns slow zoom on a hero image. SVG animation for accent elements. All of it under 50 KB combined.
The visual result on AetherHaus is calm, premium, and considered. The technical result is pages that load in under 2 seconds on mobile, that crawl cleanly, and that gave Google enough trust signals to rank the site #1 for "cold plunge Vancouver" within 9 months from a starting position of nowhere.
The 89 AI citations across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Copilot would not exist if the site was too slow for those crawlers to render efficiently. AI crawlers are even more sensitive to render time than Google because they're hitting your site mid-query for a live user. A 4-second LCP is often a timeout.
The lesson for every premium brand running a content programme
If your site is video-heavy and your organic traffic is flat, the video is part of the problem. Not the only part, but a real one. The brand team will resist removing it because the brand brief specified it. The agency will resist removing it because they built it. The dev team will resist removing it because the components are already shipped.
Remove it anyway. The trade you are making is small: a less cinematic site in exchange for a site that ranks, gets cited, loads fast, and does not eat your hosting plan. Premium brands that win on search are the ones who understand that performance is a brand attribute, not a technical concern.
The AetherHaus video ban is the cleanest example I have of an infrastructure constraint becoming a brand guardrail. The site is more disciplined because of it. The numbers are better because of it. And the rule is still in every contractor brief, 9 months later, with no exceptions.
Liam Lytton is the founder of The 66th, an SEO and GEO agency in Vancouver that has driven results including 1,500% organic traffic growth, 5x revenue, and 4x lead volume for clients across North America.
