How to make a video loop on your website

A looping video restarts itself when it reaches the end. On this site it is one switch: open the builder, go to Playback, turn on Loop. That is the whole answer, and if that is all you needed you can stop here.

The rest of this page is about why the instructions everywhere else usually do not work, and when a loop is the wrong idea.

Why looping usually fails on YouTube

Almost every tutorial tells you to add loop=1 to the end of the embed URL. On a single video, YouTube ignores it completely.

The reason is a quirk of how the player was built. It does not loop a video; it loops a queue. With one video and no queue, there is nothing to return to, so it stops. To make a queue of one, you have to name the same video a second time:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID?loop=1&playlist=VIDEO_ID

That is the fix. The video ID appears twice, once in the address and once in the playlist. It looks wrong and it is correct.

What makes this the most common broken YouTube embed on the web is that nothing tells you it failed. There is no error and no warning. The video simply plays once and stops, which looks exactly like a video that has not been set to loop, so people assume the setting did not save. Anything generated here adds the second reference for you.

The other platforms

Vimeo, Dailymotion and Streamable loop with a single setting and no trick. So does a video file you host yourself. Loom does not support looping at all, and its player will ignore the request rather than fail loudly, which is why the option is greyed out here rather than offered and quietly dropped.

The background video recipe

Most people asking about looping want the same thing: a short clip playing silently behind or beside some text, as part of the design rather than as something to sit and watch. That is four settings together, not one:

• Loop, so it never stops on a frozen frame.
• Autoplay, which also turns on Mute, becausebrowsers refuse audible autoplay.
• Player controls off, so there is no bar inviting people to interact with something that is meant to be scenery.
• A short clip. Ten to fifteen seconds. Anything longer is a video pretending to be a background.

One caution: if the loop is more than a few seconds, accessibility guidelines expect a visible way to stop it. Keep it short, or keep the controls.

Looping part of a video

You can loop a section rather than the whole thing by setting a start and a stop time, which is covered instarting a video at a specific moment. It is useful for pulling ten good seconds out of a longer clip without editing anything.

There is a catch on YouTube worth knowing before you rely on it: the stop time applies to the first play only. When the video loops, it runs to the real end of the video rather than back to your stop point. Vimeo and hosted files do not have this problem. If you need an exact loop of a section on YouTube, trim the clip and reupload it.

When not to loop

Anything with sound. A repeating voice or a repeating music sting is the fastest way to make somebody leave a page.

Anything long. A five minute video on loop is not a loop, it is a video that will not stop. Nobody reaches the end of it twice on purpose.

Anything with an ending. If the clip resolves, cuts to black, or finishes on a logo, the loop will draw attention to the seam every time it comes round. Clips that loop well either move continuously or start and end on nearly the same frame.

Anything you are paying to serve. A looping video you host yourself keeps downloading for as long as the page is open. On YouTube or Vimeo that is their bandwidth. On your own hosting it is your bill.