The Opportunities section of your Lighthouse report lists all animated GIFs, along with estimated savings in seconds achieved by converting these GIFs to video:
Why you should replace animated GIFs with video
Large GIFs are inefficient for delivering animated content. By converting large GIFs to videos, you can save big on users' bandwidth. Consider using MPEG4/WebM videos for animations and PNG/WebP for static images instead of GIF to save network bytes.
Create MPEG videos
There are a number of ways to convert GIFs to video.
FFmpeg is the tool used in this guide.
To use FFmpeg to convert the GIF, my-animation.gif to an MP4 video,
run the following command in your console:
ffmpeg -i my-animation.gif my-animation.mp4
This tells FFmpeg to take my-animation.gif as the input,
signified by the -i flag,
and to convert it to a video called my-animation.mp4.
Create WebM videos
WebM videos are much smaller than MP4 videos, but not all browsers support WebM, so it makes sense to generate both.
To use FFmpeg to convert my-animation.gif to a WebM video,
run the following command in your console:
ffmpeg -i my-animation.gif -c vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 41 my-animation.webm
Replace the GIF image with a video
Animated GIFs have three key traits that a video needs to replicate:
- They play automatically.
- They loop continuously (usually, but it is possible to prevent looping).
- They're silent.
Luckily, you can recreate these behaviors using the <video> element.
<video autoplay loop muted playsinline>
<source src="my-animation.webm" type="video/webm" />
<source src="my-animation.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
Use a service that converts GIFs to HTML5 videos
Many image CDNs support GIF to HTML5 video conversion. You upload a GIF to the image CDN, and the image CDN returns an HTML5 video.
Stack-specific guidance
AMP
For animated content, use
amp-anim to minimize CPU
usage when the content is offscreen.
Drupal
Consider uploading your GIF to a service that can make it available to embed as a video.