Sooner or later you’ll want to feature a video on your WordPress site. Fortunately, adding video is almost as simple as adding a link.
Oh, sure, you can add fancy plugins to display videos, and some themes have their own add-ons. Out of the box, WordPress lets you do it easily without any fancy hoops to jump through.
Since YouTube is the most popular video site, today I’ll walk you through adding a YouTube video to WordPress. The steps will be similar if you’re using another video site like Vimeo.
#1. Create Your Video
Before you can add a video to your WordPress post or page, you need to create it and upload it to YouTube. (Or locate someone else’s video you plan to share — just make sure you have permission!)
#2. Write your Post or Page
Go ahead and add a new post or page, just as you normally would.
#3. Go back to YouTube and get the Link
To include a video on your page, you need a link from YouTube. There are a couple different types of links you can use for WordPress.
Underneath the video, you’ll see its title, number of views and other meta information. Under that you’ll see a line with the like/dislike icons on the left.
Look to the right and you’ll see a small menu which includes About, Share, Add to and a few other choices.
Select Share.
After you click Share, you’ll see some new options.
Notice the social media links. Directly underneath is a URL. You could insert the URL directly into your post as a link, but that won’t show the video viewer that signals to your readers, “oh, here’s a video to click on.”
Instead, take one more step.
Just above the row of social media icons you’ll see three menu items. Click the second one, Embed.
Now you have a much longer bit of code, but that’s ok.
YouTube will also give you a choice of different video sizes — your best choice is often the smallest one as it’s less likely to mess up your page display on mobile devices. And everyone knows how to englarge the video to full screen if they want to, right?
Underneath the size picker are three other options.
Once you’ve selected the options you want, highlight the code inside the box, and copy it.
#4. Paste the Code into WordPress
Now go back to your WordPress post, place your cursor where you want the video, and paste in that code.
That’s all there is to it! Save, Publish, and you’ll have video in your WordPress post or page.
