Currently a static screenshot of the main screen. I have a 40 second walkthrough recorded and I could also cut a short loop out of it.
Before I spend a weekend on this: does the media above the fold move anything, and if so which format? Roughly 900 visits a month so I cannot really A/B test my way to an answer.
A six to eight second silent loop of the single action that makes the product make sense beats both of your options, in my experience across three landing pages.
Nobody presses play on 40 seconds cold - you are asking for a commitment before you have earned one. And a static screenshot of a dashboard tells a first-time visitor almost nothing, because they do not know what any of it means yet; screenshots work for people who already understand the category.
Ship the loop as mp4 or webm with a poster image, muted, inline, autoplaying. Not as a gif. The same clip as a gif is routinely an order of magnitude larger in bytes because gif has no real video compression, and that weight lands directly on the slowest part of your page.
The poster image does more work than people give it credit for. On a slow connection it is what gets measured as your largest contentful paint, and for a chunk of mobile visitors it is the only frame they will ever see, because they scroll before the video decodes. Treat it as a still ad rather than a placeholder.
Disagreeing with the whole framing. If people watched your demo and still asked what it is, the media is not the problem - the sentence above the media is. Nothing in the video can rescue a headline that has not told me what category of thing this is and who it is for.
Cheap experiment: for one week, delete the media block entirely. One sentence, one supporting line, one button. If nothing gets worse, you have learned that you were about to spend a weekend on the wrong element.
Ran this accidentally when my CDN broke and every image on the page 404'd for two days. Signups were flat. Depressing and extremely useful.
Converting the gif was the easiest win I have had. My original loop was a 6.8MB gif exported from a screen recorder. Same clip as an mp4 with a reasonable quality setting came out around 380KB, and a webm was smaller again. One ffmpeg command, poster frame grabbed from the first frame, video tag with muted, loop, playsinline and autoplay. The page went from feeling sticky on my phone to loading before I could see it load.
Counter-example so you know it is not universal: mine is text-heavy and motion made it unreadable, because the interesting part is words on screen and six seconds is not long enough to read them. An annotated static screenshot with one arrow and one short label won clearly.
Whatever you do, show it to five strangers and ask them what the product does before they scroll. At 900 visits a month that is a better instrument than any test you can run.
Loop the action. Caption it in one line. Put the price directly under it.
@exdiv_eli · 3d ago
Numbers to make the format decision less about taste. The current pass mark for largest contentful paint is under 2.5 seconds at the 75th percentile of real visitors over a rolling 28 day window. A multi-megabyte gif sitting above the fold will fail that on mobile all by itself, and unlike a design opinion that one shows up in your search console.
Separately, on unattended autoplay, attention falls off a cliff after roughly ten seconds. Your 40 second video is realistically a 9 second video with 31 seconds of hope attached.
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