Embedding your videos onto your site

So you have a fantastic new video that you now want to share with the big wide world. Scary, but exciting too eh?

Wordpress makes embedding videos simple. If you have hosted your video locally - i.e. on the same hosting platform as your website - then it's a simple case of clicking on the Media or Video button in your page or post editor, finding the video in the media library and inserting it. Simple!

If you have added specialist video plugins for uploading and playing, then you'll probably find buttons in your page or post editor that will simplify the embed process even more.

Embedding a video from YouTube

For those who, like most, choose to host their videos on YouTube, then the process is equally as simple. This process is very similar on Vimeo, in as much as you are finding the video's embed code and manually adding it to your page or post.

As mentioned earlier in this tutorial, YouTube have developed a Plugin tool that makes embedding really easy, allowing you to do it all from the comfort of your Wordpress editing page. But for those who'd rather not use the plugin, the method is very straight-forward.

Firstly, you'll need to locate the video that you want to embed, on YouTube. Then when on the video's YouTube page, locate the Embed button underneath the video player. On clicking this, some embed code will be shown, with some size and format options that you can also play with.

Highlight this code and then copy it. Then switch windows back to Wordpress, and at the top-right hand corner of your Wordpress editor, click the HTML tab - This may also be shown as the TEXT tab. Scroll down your page or post text to where you'd like the video to be inserted, and then simply paste the embed code.

You can then click back on the Visual tab beside the HTML or TEXT tab and you'll see an icon where you have just pasted your code. Don't worry, on the live page this will be shown as the video itself - this is perfectly normal. Then save or update your page or post, and then click on View to see your video live on the page.

Voila! One embedded video.

Whilst this has been a relatively quick run through of what you need to do and consider when adding video to your website, I do hope that you also found it useful and that it helps you add gravitas to your website's user engagement. If so, please LIKE this tutorial and/or add any comment, feedback or questions that you may have, below.

So now go and do your best Spielberg! I look forward to seeing the results.

Kind regards,

Sean