What is iFrame in website
The importance of creating quality content is now fully understood by all internet users from business owners to digital marketing service providers. To do so, market participants focus on the quality of content as well as innovative methods to push the limits further and make their users more delighted.
One of the methods to improve content quality is using embedded content like a relevant video from an external source like Youtube within your content. By doing so, the website not only enriches their content by a relevant visualized content from a reputable website, but also doesn’t overload their server by storing the videos. As the website cost in Dubai is relatively high, using embedded videos would save on server costs, as there is no need to purchase extra servers for speed improvement purposes.
An option to embed videos to your webpage is to utilize an inline frame or iFrame element.
What does iFrame mean in a website
iFrame, which is short for inline frame, is an HTML element that contains another HTML inside it. It is specified with an iFrame tag and through which you are able to embed a document, an audio file or an online video from an external source within your web page just like an integral part of your webpage. The iFrame tag as an HTML element makes you capable of putting any content from other websites within your web page to enhance the quality of your content. Assume that you have done your ecommerce web design in Dubai and you are now uploading products and their specifications into your ecommerce website. To enrich your content about a specific product, you may use the iFrame tag to put a video from youtube ( with permission) in the user manual section to engage users more with no need to store that video on your servers.
How to integrate iFrame?
iFrame tags are pretty easy to implement. However, it must be styled in a way that matches your webpage’s aesthetics. We are now taking you through the basic iFrame tag and how to modify it for a better result and appearance. Here is the basic iFrame tag:
<iframe src=”URL”></iframe>
Where <iframe> specifies the HTML tag and src defines the source or URL of the external content.
You can make it well-displayed on your web page by adding dimensions to the code, for the sake of resizing the external content to match with your homepage and content. Here is the code:
<iframe src=”https://www.example.com/” width=”1200px” height=”400px”></iframe>
By adding the width and height to the iFrame tag, the content from the external source, say a video from Youtube, will be resized to match to the defined dimensions.
By adding a wide range of codes to the iFrame tag you can customize the configuration further. For instance, you are able to embed a location on Google map within your web page and make the external content responsive to display perfectly on all types of devices and a lot more.
What are the iFrame benefits and drawbacks?
iFrame Benefits
The iFrame element comes with a few advantages. It enriches your content by adding additional content from external sources. You can add high quality video from Youtube with no extra pressure on your servers. It prevents your website from a top SEO error, which is slow loading speed. iFrame is customizable, so you can change the configuration of the external content to display on your web page perfectly.
iFrame Drawbacks
The most important drawback of utilizing iFrame is the security concerns. Since you embed content from third parties, you have no control on the data that your website interacts with. Firstly, make sure that the website you are embedding content from is trustworthy and secondly, use Sandbox and Allow attributes to mitigate the risk. Your website may be damaged if attackers manage to inject harmful codes into your webpage.
Besides, if the embedded content takes too long to retrieve from its source, it would adversely affect the user experience. As such, make sure about the loading time and never use too many iFrames. However, if you need to use a few iFrames within your webpage, make sure to use the Lazy attribute, so the content will only be loaded when it comes into the visitor’s view.
Wrapping up
iFrane is a great HTML tag that enriches the content on your website. It is one of the required elements for a modern website design these days. However, you must be vigilant when utilizing iFrame to customize the configuration with care, in order to match your webpage aesthetics. In addition, never fail to use appropriate codes as mentioned earlier in this article, to avoid the security and UX issues that utilizing iFrame may cause.
