How Long Does It Take To Upload A Video On YouTube?

YouTube is a versatile network for all ages and preferences alike. At some point in life, everyone wants to upload a video on YouTube to share some event that happened, or yet commercialize their content. However, the upload times on this network can vary and be confusing, so to say. In this article, we’ll give a proper answer to how long does it take to upload a video on YouTube.

The speed of uploading your video on YouTube varies on many factors, starting from your internet, video format, power of your PC, and general traffic on YouTube.

That said, aside from giving the accurate time of how long it takes for a YouTube video to be uploaded online, we’ll also give some important tips that will accelerate the uploading process, and save you some time and nerves.

How Long Does It Take To Upload a Video On YouTube?

Given certain factors that we’ll detail more in the further sections of this article, your video may take less or more time to upload on YouTube. With that said, some videos can take a literal minute to upload, while some will take a couple of hours, and even more.

Uploading videos can be extremely annoying if it ends up time-consuming, especially if you’re excited about the content you want to share. More often than not, video creators get stuck with video uploading at least once in their YouTube careers.

• If you’re lucky and everything works properly, your video should take from one minute to 10-15 minutes to upload, depending on the size and format of the video.
• If there are some hiccups in terms of your internet connection, size, format, and the traffic on YouTube, as well as some technical issues, videos can take hours until they’re uploaded on YouTube.

Factors That Determine The Upload Speed Of A YouTube Video

Below we’ll discuss factors that are determining the upload speed when uploading to YouTube. One or more of these factors can affect the upload times, making you wait for hours before your video is uploaded.

Format: There are many different formats for a video that is uploading on YouTube. Some common formats determine the size and quality of the video, but some video formats are not so common and take more time to upload. Video supports nearly every video format, but it has a few exceptions that it listed on its Troubleshooting page.

Size: Size and format are closely related because the size of the video determines its quality and vice versa. Some formats are heftier than others, thus making the file size bigger too. YouTube may need more time to process larger videos than those that are smaller in size, before uploading them.

Some smaller video files can take a literal few minutes to upload. However, larger videos can take hours. The duration of the video also plays a big role in file size. YouTube has different account permissions when it comes to video duration. Still, videos that last more than an hour may as well take more to upload.

Upload Traffic: The length of the video influences the size of the file. However, an important factor in the upload speed also includes the upload traffic. The upload traffic represents the people who are uploading a video at the same time as you’re. If there are a lot of people who are uploading at the moment, it’ll take more time to upload a video on YouTube.

Uploading videos tasks the YouTube servers. Given that YouTube is one of the most visited networks on the internet, there are thousands of people who are uploading the videos at the same time as you’re. If the uploading takes long, a lot of people are likely trying to upload at the moment too.

Internet Connection: Finally, one of the crucial factors for a swift and smooth upload process of your video is the internet connection. The internet connection that is slow and unreliable may result in slow upload speeds, especially if the video is large. Additionally, wifi could slow down the uploading even more.

Here’s a list of common internet speeds and the time that it takes to upload a video on average. Imagine that you want to upload a video that is 1GB in size, has a certain format and duration. Let’s see how long it’ll take you based on different internet speeds, given the perfect conditions:

• 1MBps – 15-20 minutes
• 10MBs – 2-5 minutes
• 100MBps – 20 seconds to 1 minute
• 1GBps – 1-5 seconds (depending on delays)

How to Upload A Video On YouTube Faster?

If you’re struggling with terrifying bad upload speeds for your YouTube videos, perhaps it’s time to check a different approach to improve your internet connection, as well as other factors to upload your video faster. Below, we’ll provide our tips to make the uploading faster, and not stress yourself over slow upload speeds.

Check Your Internet Connection

Sometimes the bad internet connection can cause your video to upload slower, or be stuck at a certain percentage. It happens most of the time when the video uploading is stuck. You can Use ZDnet’s speed checking tool or any other Speed Test. You can ping the server of your ISP, or even call the technical support who will restart your router from their end.

Also, ensure that no other resources use your internet resources at the moment of uploading. If you have weaker internet, close other YouTube videos that you watched meanwhile and disconnect other devices from the internet. Also, ensure that you’re not uploading anything else at the moment.

Don’t Upload When The Upload Traffic Is High

We know that uploading your videos at certain times is important because of your reach and other factors that improve your visibility. Still, when the upload traffic is too high, it can result in slow uploads, and even getting stuck while uploading. That’s why you should upload your videos at certain times when there’s no peak in the upload traffic.

Compress Your Video File

Although compressing your video file could affect your quality, sometimes it’s necessary. Smaller size videos won’t take as much time to upload. The best option is to have an MP4 file, while larger files like MOV will increase the upload times.

Try Using Another Browser

Sometimes the cause of low upload speeds can be nothing else than your browser. The browser acts as a client that communicates with the webserver (in this case YouTube) and sends the data. Sometimes, one browser may not work as well as another browser, which is why you should experiment with other options.

Try A Different Device

Some people tend to upload from their iPhone or an Android smartphone. However, sometimes, even the laptop can be a bad choice if the connection and internet speed are bad. As said earlier, it’s best to upload your videos using a strong internet connection, via an Ethernet cable. If uploading from your smart device gets your video stuck, you should try switching to a laptop or a desktop with a strong internet connection.

Clear Cache

Our browser collects cache, cookies, and other junk data and files from the sessions and ads from other websites. Sometimes, this can clog the traffic, as well as your browser. If your video uploading is stuck at some percentage, you should try cleaning the cache, cookies, and web history to boost up the video speed. It’ll most likely fix your problem.

Let Your Hard-Drive Breathe

Hard-drives are responsible for transfer and access speeds on our computers, a slower hard-drive may take more time to access the data from the video and hand it over to the server. Make sure to free up your space, and let your hard-drive breathe. Most of the good computers have a 7200 RPM hard-drive. If you have the older hard-drives with 5400 RPM, you may end up struggling to upload files.

Check The High-Definition Documentation

Although high-definition videos bear the best quality, they contribute to the higher file size, and with that a slower video upload. If you use video-editing software when preparing your YouTube video, you should check out the documentation in order to determine the best methods to keep the definition high, without compromising the upload speed, and file size. Otherwise, disable some features, trying not to compromise the video quality.

A Final Word From Run Gun Shoot

If you were looking for the answer to how long does it take to upload a video on YouTube, we hope that you found your answer. Also, these tips should help you improve your upload speeds for videos on YouTube if you were struggling with them before.

Although many believe that a powerful computer helps with better upload speeds, it’s mostly the internet connection that takes the credit for the fate of your video that’s uploading. Also, always make sure to check the times when the upload traffic on YouTube is moderate or low so that you have better chances to upload your video swiftly.