Did you know that the number of people watching video content has increased significantly over the past two years? This is largely due to the increase in smartphone usage and faster internet speeds.
However, while it’s easier than ever to embed videos from sites like YouTube and Vimeo, many new bloggers don’t know how to do it.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to embed YouTube videos into your WordPress posts.
But before we get into that, let’s first understand why you should embed videos in your blog posts.
A blog post with a video will:
- Give readers a better understanding of the topic.
- Get readers to spend more time on your website.
- Make your articles more multimedia-friendly (and more SEO-friendly).
If this were your own YouTube video, you would:
- Get more views, shares, and subscriptions.
- Earn more money with AdSense for YouTube.
There are many other advantages, but knowing these ones is a good start.
Whenever I work with new authors or provide consulting for WordPress, one of the questions I’m asked most often is:
- “Hey Harsh! How do I add YouTube videos in WordPress?”
Well, if you’ve never embedded a video in a blog post before (not to be confused with the term “embed,” as it simply means adding a video from YouTube) , then this handy guide will help you learn some WordPress video tips.
How to Embed YouTube Videos in WordPress
It's easy to add YouTube videos to your WordPress blog posts.
You don’t need to download videos and upload them to WordPress because WordPress supports automatic embedding for YouTube and other popular video hosting and social networking sites (Ted, Facebook, Vimeo, WordPress.tv, Instagram, etc.) .
You can see a full list of supported sites here .
Auto-embedding means that you can just paste the URL of the video in plain text and WordPress will automatically place the video in your post.
Let me show you how to do this:
- Go to the YouTube video you want to embed.
- Click Share and copy the URL.
Now paste the URL into your WordPress post editor (it should not be a hyperlink). WordPress will automatically render the video and embed it into the post.
The YouTube video will now appear in your article.
To add a YouTube video using the embed code:
The above method is the fastest when you want to add a YouTube video to your blog post.
However, sometimes you may want to add a video to other parts of your blog, such as a widget area that can't be automatically embedded.
You can use YouTube's (non-automatic) embed feature here to get the embed code.
- Go to the YouTube video.
- Click Share.
- Click Embed.
Here you can control the size of the video player, disable showing related videos, and do some other things like remove the YouTube control buttons.
Once you’ve configured your settings, simply paste the embed code into the section you’d like to add the widget to.
That's it!
Embed YouTube Videos in WordPress
Adding videos can help improve your articles. Using WordPress' automatic embed method to display YouTube videos in your articles is the quickest and easiest way.
[](https://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds)You can learn more about embedding in WordPress by reading this official help page .
So go ahead and embed a YouTube video in your next WordPress post!
If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to ask them in the comments below.
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