Running a WordPress website or a WordPress blog requires an individual/team to stay on their front foot. This is needed to keep the visitors engaged at all times so that the purpose of the website is fulfilled. Talking of engagement, the presence of good content on the website can be a huge enabler of the same. Now, this GOOD content is the lifestream of your website and all efforts must be made in the direction of ensuring the best of it.
For people who are either running a WordPress blog or are looking to start blogging using WordPress, here’s a tip. A great way of supercharging the content on your website is by introducing ‘Video’ content into the content strategy if your website.
As per statistics, in 2019, 80% of global Internet consumption is all video content. Videos engage the audience because they definitely express your offering in a better manner than just the text. Also, websites that use video content grow their revenue 49% faster than non-video users. We hope that these figures will further convince you into leveraging video content o in your WordPress blog posts.
If you earlier fought the idea of embedding video content on your site, let us tell you that WordPress makes it super easy to embed videos from video hosting sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. So, you can now give it a thought and eventually, supercharge the content on your website.
So, now let’s help you with a precise guide about embedding Videos in WordPress Blog Posts and Pages. Well, there is more than one way of embedding videos in your WordPress blog posts. Let’s go through them. Alternatively, you can learn more embeds through the WordPress Embeds.
The Classic Editor way:
If you are a fan of the old WordPress classic editor, you can easily embed a video from a source such as YouTube and get it in your WordPress blog posts. All you need to do is copy the URL of the video and paste it in the editor. For users who have the visual editor, they will be able to see a preview of the video of how it would appear on their website.
If you want to embed these videos on your Sidebar widget, here is what you need to do:
- Log in to your WordPress site’s dashboard using the login credentials
- Enter the site’s dashboard
- Navigate to the Appearance » Widgets page
- Once you are on the Widgets page, you need to add the ‘Text’ widget to a sidebar.
- Now, paste the video URL in the content area.
- This will do the trick for you and the video preview will be presented to you.
- Click on ‘Save’ to save the changes.
If you are looking to customize these video embeds, you will have to do a bit more. Instead of copying the URL, click on the Embed tab and the following will show up.
You will now be able to start your video from the choice of your time duration. You can also choose to show Player controls and can enable privacy-enhanced mode.
Video embed Plugins from WordPress
For the code-free users, WordPress has Video embed plugins that will help them easily embed the video in their WordPress blog post. Here are a few Video embed plugins offered by WordPress.
1. WonderPlugin Video Embed: This video embed plugin is an easy way to add video embeds to your WordPress site i.e the sidebar widget, WordPress posts, and pages. It will help you easily add videos from platform sources such as YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, iFrame, self-hosted MP4/WebM videos. For videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and MP4/WebM videos, the plugin provides an auto close video popup when the video ends.
Here’s how you can use this plugin in the Gutenberg editor. The video player offered by this plugin is highly responsive and it will appropriately work on iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge.
2. Easy Video Player: The Easy video player is yet another popular video embedding plugin available in the WordPress repository. If you are looking to embed self-hosted videos or externally hosted videos using direct links, this plugin should be your choice. However, in order to use this plugin, you need to be a website that is a self-hosted one, running on WordPress hosting.
You can embed MP4 videos, responsive videos, HTML5 videos, video with poster images, video with autoplay, video with a loop, and video with muted enabled. You can also embed videos using MediaElement player or default WordPress video player. Also, by using the modifier classes, you can customize the video player.
However, make sure that your website stays optimized so that the videos on the website don’t end up consuming all the bandwidth and causing your website to slow down. Hence, always check out third party reviews before choosing your ultimate web hosting service.
3. ARVE Advanced Responsive Video Embedder: With over 60,000+ installations, this WordPress plugin is an easy and simple way for embedding videos. The best thing about this WordPress plugin is that it is SEO friendly. This means that the plugin lets you specify an SEO-optimized title and description to the videos for the search engines for better indexing.
This plugin is much recommended for embedding videos since it supports almost every video host that supports iframe embed codes. Also, it makes URL embedded videos responsive. It also provides optional maximal width and Video alignment to your videos when they show up on your website.
Note: If you are thinking about uploading your own videos directly to WordPress, that might not be a deal. If you are a small WordPress blog that uses shared WordPress hosting accounts, you can end up eating a lot of server resources. Now, you are left with the option of uploading videoes to platforms like YouTube in order to easily embed them on your WordPress. However, if you are not likely to do that, you can also try Vimeo or DailyMotion.
Conclusion:
Adding videos to your WordPress content can definitely increase the overall value of your website and also lead to increased engagement on the website. With the ability to easily embed videos to your WordPress blog posts, you can achieve both and eventually, impress your audience.
