How to Easily Embed Videos in WordPress Blog Posts
Do you want to embed videos in your WordPress blog posts? Videos bring life to your website, and they are a great way to increase user engagement.
WordPress makes it super easy to embed videos from video hosting sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and many others.
In this beginner’s guide, we will show you how to easily embed videos in WordPress blog posts, pages, and sidebar widgets.
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Why Embed Videos in Your WordPress Blog Posts?
Adding videos to your WordPress blog is a great way to capture your visitor’s attention and boost engagement and conversions.
Videos help to increase the time your users spend on your website, and some visitors may even prefer to watch a video than reading written text.
Here at WPBeginner, we embed videos into our most popular WordPress tutorials.
Should You Upload Videos Directly to WordPress?
Well, you can, but we don’t recommend you do so.
Most small blogs use shared WordPress hosting accounts, and videos can take up a lot of server resources. If your video gets a lot of traffic, then your website is more likely to crash.
Secondly, you are missing out on traffic from YouTube users and other video hosting sites.
YouTube is not only the biggest video hosting site, but it is also the world’s second most popular search engine and the second most popular social network right after Facebook.
If you don’t want to upload your videos to YouTube, then you can use other platforms like Vimeo, Jetpack Video, Wistia, and more.
For more details, see our post on why you should never upload a video to WordPress.
That being said, let’s show you how you can embed videos in WordPress blog posts, step by step. Simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the method you want to use.
Video Tutorial
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If you’d prefer written instructions, just keep reading.
Method 1. Embedding Videos in WordPress Blog Posts and Pages Using Block Editor
WordPress comes with a great feature called auto-embeds which allows your website to automatically get the embed code from popular video hosting services like YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
All you need to do is paste the video URL into the WordPress editor.
For example, you can copy the YouTube URL for a video that you want to embed.
Next, edit the WordPress post or page where you want to add the video, and simply paste the URL in the content area.
As soon as you paste the video URL, WordPress will fetch the embed code and display the YouTube video inside the content editor.
You can now save your post by clicking the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button to see the embedded video in your live post.
Wasn’t that easy?
After you have added the video, you can change its settings by clicking on the video in the editor and making changes from the popup toolbar.
You can adjust the video width, change the alignment, and more. You can also add a caption and preserve the video’s aspect ratio on mobile devices.
WordPress can only do auto-embeds for white-listed video services. For other websites, you will still have to obtain the embed code and then paste it in your blog posts.
Here is a list of white-listed video services for auto embeds in WordPress:
- Amazon
- Animoto
- Cloudup
- CollegeHumor
- Crowdsignal
- Dailymotion
- Flickr
- Hulu
- Imgur
- Issuu
- Kickstarter
- Meetup.com
- Mixcloud
- ReverbNation
- Screencast
- Scribd
- Slideshare
- SmugMug
- Someecards
- SoundCloud
- Speaker Deck
- Spotify
- TED
- Tumblr
- VideoPress
- Vimeo
- WordPress.tv
- YouTube
If you want to add a video from a website outside this list, then you will need the full HTML embed code for the video.
Simply copy the HTML code provided by the video website and paste it inside the ‘HTML’ block in the editor.
To learn more, see our beginner’s guide on how to edit HTML in WordPress code editor.
Method 2. Embedding Videos in WordPress Using the Old Classic Editor
If you are still using the old WordPress classic editor, then you can embed the videos the same way.
Simply copy the URL from a video hosting service like YouTube, and paste it in the editor. If you are using the visual editor, then you will see a preview of the video.
However, you will not be able to use the width adjustment and other options that you can use in the new WordPress block editor.
Make sure you click the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button to make your changes live.
Method 3. How to Embed Videos in WordPress Sidebar Widgets
Just like a WordPress post or page, you can also embed videos in WordPress sidebar widgets.
Simply go to Appearance » Widgets in your WordPress admin area and then click the ‘Plus’ add block icon.
After that, search for ‘Video’ in the search bar.
Then, you can click on the block for the type of video you want to add. For example, YouTube, Vimeo, TED, and more.
Next, you need to paste your video URL into the box, click the ‘Embed’ button, and it will automatically be added to the widget area.
Then, all you have to do is click the ‘Update’ button, and the video widget will now be live on your website.
Now, you can visit your website to see the video live. The size of the video will automatically scale based on the size of your widget area.
To learn more, see our guide on how to add and use widgets in WordPress.
Method 4. Using WordPress Video Embed Plugins to Embed Videos
By default, you don’t need to use a plugin to embed videos in WordPress. However, you may want to use plugins to improve the video viewing experience on your website.
The following are a few plugins that you may want to try.
Smash Balloon YouTube Feed Pro is one of the best YouTube video gallery plugins for WordPress in the market.
It allows you to automatically embed all of your YouTube channel videos in a customizable gallery format. It automatically imports new videos, combines feeds, can add live streaming, embed a YouTube playlist, and more.
Plus, it includes likes, shares, comments, and reactions, which can help to boost your social proof.
There’s also a free version of YouTube feed plugin available you can use to simply add your YouTube channel feed to WordPress.
To learn more, see our guide on how to show latest videos from YouTube channel in WordPress.
You can also use the Smash Balloon YouTube feed plugin with the Social Wall plugin that combines all of your social media content from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube on a single page.
YouTube Subscribe Bar shows a YouTube subscribe button below your YouTube video embeds in WordPress. It also fetches your YouTube subscriber count to add social proof and encourage more users to subscribe to your channel.
We first created it to promote WPBeginner’s YouTube channel on this website. Many of our users asked us to share how we did this, so we decided to release it as a free plugin.
Lazy Load for Videos solves the problem of loading video embed scripts from external websites, which has an impact on website page load speed and performance.
Instead, it only loads the embed code when the user clicks on the play button.
By the way, you won’t need this plugin if you use the Smash Balloon YouTube Feed plugin because it has built-in caching and delayed loading for the video player.
We hope this article helped you learn how to easily embed videos in WordPress blog posts. You may also want to see our guide on how to register a domain name and our expert picks of the best business phone services for small businesses.
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