Background Video Poster

In HTML, a video poster refers to an image that should be shown while the video is downloading.

<video poster="URL">

On background videos, this image is specified in the data-poster-url attribute, and Webflow generates a thumbnail image for you automatically.

In some cases, you may prefer to create your own image, or to create a WEBP image as recommended by Google Lighthouse. This feature allows you to specify your own.

Note: Standard <video> elements can also specify a video poster, using the poster attribute- however in Webflow, the standard video elements are designed to embed video players such as YouTube’s which use an <iframe> embed approach instead.

Usage Notes

This tool will replace the data-poster-url attribute on Webflow’s background videos with the image url you specify.

To use-

  • Create and setup your background video element

  • Create your poster image, e.g. a WEBP file, and add it to your website assets

  • Get the URL of that uploaded asset

  • Select your video element, and add a custom attribute of wfu-data-poster-url, and a value of your poster’s URL

Add the WFU video library to your page or site just before the closing body element.

On page load, WFU will find your background videos with that special attribute, and apply your specified URL value to the data-poster-url.

Getting Started ( NOCODE )

STEP 1 - Add the Library

There are currently no configuration options for this feature, so we’ll use a no-code integration approach.

Install JS in HEAD, generally site-wide.

<!-- Sygnal Attributes 5 | Video -->
<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sygnaltech/[email protected]/dist/nocode/webflow-video.min.js"></script>

STEP 2 - Apply wfu-data-poster-url to the Background Videos

See above for details.

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