Your website is the core of your business – it’s the hub that all of your marketing eventually points towards and is a fundamental part of the sales funnel. This means that the design of your website should be as carefully considered and engaging as possible.

One of the best ways to make any content engaging is through video. It increases a user’s time spent on a page, allowing you to provide more information.

As any website designer would know, getting high-quality video content onto a website requires balancing site speed, video quality, and hosting content through another channel like YouTube or Vimeo.

Website pages work at their best and load faster when all the files are tiny- video files are naturally larger than most other types of content. Unfortunately, this means there’s a ceiling on the amount of video footage uploaded per page before the site speed suffers.

This is why embedding videos from another channel works well, but that does leave some design limitations and means that another party controls your content.

So, how do you get custom content onto your website to make it as engaging as possible without damaging site speed? Vector animations.

What’s the difference between a vector animation and a regular video file?

In terms of a visual style, vector animations have some limits that you don’t have with video.

This means that you can’t use any form of photographic content as a vector animation. However, this doesn’t mean that your assets can’t be high-quality. There are almost limitless ways to be creative with graphic design- a process that goes hand in hand with vector animation.

Vectors are perfect for web-based content as they scale up and down without losing quality.

No matter how big or small you need your animation to be displayed- there won’t be any pixelation as it uses numbers and information to create an image. This is different from photographic and video content, which is limited by the number of pixels in the frame.

The critical difference between vector animations and regular video files is the way that their information can be saved and then uploaded onto a website.

Your video files (.mp4, .mov, etc.) are saved in the same way that almost any other file with visual information is saved. You can open them on any device and view them without any issues. 

Vector animations are unique because they can be saved as code and data that only work through your website. In addition, the file size is incredibly small and optimized to work seamlessly with website and app design. 

The advantages of vector animation:

Custom & Lightweight

With the files being as small and easily integrated as they are- you can use vector animations all over your website. You can even use a static version to replace icons and graphics throughout your site. Custom vector animations are a great way to lead a customer through your website without sacrificing loading time.

Responsive & Interactive

Because they are rooted in code, there are many exciting ways to make the animation respond to how the user navigates any page. For example, animations can play based on how far you have scrolled through a page, clicking on the animation, or even following the cursor’s position. This means that each user will have a unique experience on your website, and they will also be engaged on it for longer.

Metadata

SEO is part of the backbone of your website, meaning that it’s vital to ensure that any assets are helping on the back end to drive up search rankings and get you to the top of Google as quickly as possible. Vector animations allow you to input metadata within the code, meaning that your animations can give a boost to both the back and front ends of your website.

Optimised

Vector graphics are essential within the design industry because they can scale up and down without losing quality. Images are made up of pixels, which can only be stretched and distorted so far before you see an exponential loss of image quality.

Vector graphics are based on information and code- they can scale up to fit a whole page or just a tiny portion of the screen, making them great for design purposes. It also ensures that your content will look clean and crisp on every device and even seamlessly transfer over to application design.

UX Integration

User experience is at the forefront of every web designer’s mind when creating a page. The user has to be able to easily navigate through the page without any roadblocks to get to where they want to go. We often go to graphics to help guide the user to provide that visual aid. Vector animations offer that next step in UX design.

You can draw the users’ attention to the right place at the right time with their responsive elements, make sure that key information is highlighted, and breathe extra life into the way your website feels from a user perspective.

More room for heavier content

Vector animations are not a wholesale replacement for image and video content. Websites will always need elements and assets that can’t be achieved in this style.

These animations reduce our reliance on this type of content to populate every page. Site speed is vital, and relying on large and heavy content will really slow that down. Animated vectors allow you to still use high-quality video and image content without sacrificing loading time.

Animated vectors come with many advantages to help your website keep users engaged, ease their access through each page, and maintain consistent, branded content. Instead of hanging images and videos on top of a framework, you can take a far more creative and interactive approach to your website design by making creative content a part of your site’s overall structure.

They’re fast, customisable and have almost countless ways to make your website stand out.

If you’re a business owner, we have created the essential top 72 marketing questions you should be asking for growing your business.

To find out more about what you could achieve with vector animation, get in touch.