Does Gobi Affect Your Page Load Time?
When you’re considering adding video to your career page or website, the same question tends to come up — from IT, from marketing, or from your ATS provider: “Will this affect page load time?”
It’s a fair question. Slow pages mean worse user experience, lower conversion, and weaker Google rankings. Nobody wants to sacrifice speed for content.
The short answer: Gobi Player is designed not to slow down your site. It loads asynchronously and fetches vertical 9:16 video only when someone actually clicks. Here’s exactly how it works.
How the embed code works
When you add Gobi to your site, you paste two things: a small <div> that marks where stories should appear, and a script tag that loads Gobi Player. What matters is when and how the script loads.
Asynchronous loading — doesn’t block the page
The Gobi script loads with the async attribute. This means the browser continues loading the rest of the page in parallel — HTML, CSS, images, and all other content renders regardless of whether the Gobi script is ready. The script blocks neither HTML parsing nor visible content rendering.
In practice, visitors see your entire page immediately. The Gobi bubbles appear when ready, without delaying anything else.
Video loads on interaction
How video data is fetched depends on the display format:
Bubbles: The video itself — naturally the heaviest resource — loads only when someone clicks a story bubble. Before that, only a small thumbnail is displayed. No video data transfers in the background, no preloading, no hidden streaming connections.
Cards: For the card layout, video metadata (duration, resolution, etc.) is preloaded so the browser can prepare for playback. The actual video data loads only when the card becomes visible or is interacted with.
Here’s the flow for bubbles:
- Page load — the Gobi script loads asynchronously
- Initialization — the script scans the page and finds your story bubbles
- Thumbnails — lightweight thumbnails appear in the bubbles (WebP format, typically 5–15 KB per image)
- Click — only now is video data fetched, streamed via fast video infrastructure
- Playback — adaptive bitrate (HLS) ensures quality adjusts to network speed
What about the script size?
The Gobi Player script is approximately 230 KB transferred (gzip-compressed). It includes everything needed to display bubbles, play video, handle subtitles, and respond to user interaction.
For context: a typical third-party script for analytics, chat widgets, or ad platforms is often 200–500 KB. The difference is that many of these scripts load immediately and block rendering. Gobi does neither — the script loads only when needed and runs in the background without affecting the rest of the page.
No third-party cookies — no consent delay
An often overlooked factor in load time is the cookie consent banner. Many video solutions (like YouTube embeds) set third-party cookies, requiring visitors to click through a consent banner before the video can play. This adds an extra step that delays content.
Gobi Player sets no third-party cookies. Stories play immediately without consent — one less barrier for visitors, and no extra delay. Read more about why Gobi doesn’t require cookie consent.
Shadow DOM — isolated from the rest of the page
Gobi Player uses Shadow DOM to encapsulate its styles. This means the player’s CSS doesn’t leak into the rest of your website, and your site’s CSS doesn’t affect the player’s appearance. This isolation eliminates conflicts with existing stylesheets — a common source of unexpected behavior with third-party widgets.
Tips for optimal performance
Whether you’re using an ATS integration or HTML embed, you can ensure the best possible performance with a few simple steps:
-
Add preconnect — to save time on DNS lookups and TLS handshakes, add a preconnect hint in
<head>:<link rel="preconnect" href="https://widget.gobistories.com" crossorigin /> -
Avoid double loading — one Gobi script per page is enough, regardless of how many places you display stories. The script automatically finds all bubbles via
gobi.discover().
Summary
Gobi Player is built with performance in mind. Asynchronous loading, video-on-demand, and the absence of cookies mean the embed code has minimal impact on your page speed. This is a deliberate design decision: we believe authentic employee videos should enrich your career page — not weigh it down.
Have questions about performance or integration? Feel free to contact us, or read our guide on how to embed Gobi on your website. New to Gobi? See our getting started guide.
