There may be a couple of reasons you may have for not embedding a YouTube video to your blog post or website. Find it difficult? It’s not. In this tutorial, we explain the easy ways to embed YouTube videos in WordPress websites. These methods are so easy that you will quickly get the hang of it.
YouTube has insane viewership. Millions of videos are uploaded every day, making it the most popular video website on the planet. It is more effective to reach out to your customers with a video rather than text or image. Also, it is more convenient to upload your videos to YouTube than to upload them directly to your website. Doing so will save you storage space on your website. That’s why it is recommended that you make use of videos uploaded to YouTube. Now, how would you embed these videos to your WordPress website? That’s the easy part. Let us show you the simplest of ways.
Way One: Paste The YouTube Video URL
This is the easiest way to embed YouTube videos. Simply paste the URL of the YouTube video where you want to show the video. WordPress will automatically fetch the URL and embed the video in that place. This way also works in the old WordPress editor.
You will also find alignment options at the top of the video. These include the following options: align right, align left, align center, wide width, and full width.
Suppose you change your mind and decide to use another video. In that case, you can easily replace the video link with the Edit option just beside the alignment button. Paste the new URL, and you are ready to go.
This is the coolest thing about WordPress: you just have to paste the YouTube video URL to embed it right into your post or page.
Way Two: Use The YouTube Block
The exciting thing with the modern WordPress editor (also known as ‘Gutenberg’) is the use of Blocks. Embedding gets easier as well. Thanks to the ‘YouTube’ block that’s available in the block library.
Just click on the ‘Add Block’ button on the right hand side of your screen (it looks like a plus sign). Once the block menu appears, search for YouTube.
Once you find the block, click on it. You will get a dialogue box with an option to enter the YouTube video link that you want to embed. Paste the link in the box and click ‘Embed.’
Now, your video will be embedded. This works just like the first way of pasting the video URL.
Way Three: How To Embed Videos in The Sidebar
If you want to display a YouTube video in the sidebar, you can do it by using the ‘text’ widget.
First, go to the WordPress dashboard and click on the “Appearance” tab. Then click on the “Widgets” option.
Locate your sidebar and add the ‘text’ widget to it. Adding a YouTube video is just a copy-paste job. Just paste the YouTube video URL in the editor, and you will see the video getting embedded soon. Click on save.
That’s it! You can now have a video in the sidebar as well.
The ways we have discussed here are the simplest ones. You can quickly add YouTube videos without any difficulty. Adding videos to the sidebar is also easy, as we discussed above. We hope this article inspires you to try embedding YouTube videos on your WordPress website.
You may wonder if these ways work only for YouTube. This is not so. In fact, WordPress can auto-embed from a couple of other sites as well. These include Amazon, Animoto, Cloudup, Dailymotion, Facebook, Flickr, Hulu, Imgur, Instagram, Meetup.com, Reddit, Scribd, Slideshare, Spotify, TED, Vimeo, WordPress.tv, among a few others.
WordPress auto-embed makes embedding all easy. If you want to have some extra features, you may try using WordPress plugins. Plugins offer more customizations. Yet, they are more complicated than the methods we discussed above. If you have any queries regarding embedding videos to WordPress, feel free to leave a comment. We would be happy to help.
