Hugues Audouard Freelance web designer and wordpress consultant

How to add a video to your WordPress post

Videos and screencasts are a great way to engage with your audience, they’re also a great way to explain a process or concept which might be difficult to communicate effectively in writing.
In this blog post and accompanying short video I show you a simple method to upload a video to a WordPress post.

First, a word on where to store your videos

I would always recommend “hosting” your video files on a service such as Youtube or Vimeo, rather than uploading the video to your own website server.

There are several good reasons for this:

  • Most hosting packages limit the amount of “bandwidth”  i.e. the amount of data that can be transferred between your server and users browsing your website. Uploading videos to your website server will cost you bandwidth. You will probably also have to add more plugins to manage and display your videos. These plugins will also increase your server load.
  • YouTube is the world’s second most used search engine and the third most visited website. Uploading a video on YouTube can therefore bring more viewers than uploading it on your own website. Social networking features of YouTube and other video sharing websites can also help trigger viral popularity of your videos.
  • Sites like YouTube or Vimeo process each video for a better web experience. Viewers can choose whether they would like to watch your video in HD or on lower resolutions. These sites also attempt to detect a user’s internet connection and device type to play the video in a quality that is best for the viewer. If you upload your video on WordPress, then you are missing out on those optimizations  features.

So, how to you (simply) add a video to your WordPress post?

Well, being true to my word I am demonstrating this… Using a video I uploaded to Youtube.

In summary of the video, the steps to follow are simple:

  • Upload your video to Youtube – don’t forget to add a meaningful title, description and tags to help Youtube users find it
  • Create you post in WordPress and identify where you want to embed the video
  • Go the the “embed” tab below your video in Youtube and set the video parameters
  • Copy the embed code from Youtube
  • Past the code into you WordPress site – be sure to be in the “text” tab of the WordPress editor
  • Publish your post and watch it go viral… 😉

I hope you found this useful, feel free to get in touch if you need assistance

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Hugues

I'm a freelance web designer & developer, as well as a bit of a digital marketing expert. I love all things WordPress and helping people make the most of their website and digital marketing presence. You'll sometimes find me lurking at various WordPress meet-ups, Facebook groups or the WordPress.org support forum...

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