Videos add a new life to your blog posts. There are tons of things that can easily be explained a 2 minute video versus a 1500 words post. In older versions of WordPress (Prior to 2.9), you were required to use the embed code from the video site, or use a plugin to embed the videos properly. Introducing in WordPress 2.9, the oEmbed feature has made it extremely easy to embed videos in your WordPress Blog posts. In this article, we will share how to easily embed third-party videos in WordPress blog posts.
How to Embed Videos in WordPress Blog Posts
All you need to do is paste the video URL into the content area. All you need to make sure is that the URL is in it’s own line and not clickable (hyperlinked). For example:
Here is how you can add Post Thumbnails in WordPress:
Wasn’t that super easy.
What are the White-Listed Providers?
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- DailyMotion
- blip.tv
- Flickr (both videos and images)
- Viddler
- Hulu
- Qik
- Revision3
- Scribd
- Photobucket
- PollDaddy
- Google Video
- WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)
- SmugMug (WordPress 3.0+)
- FunnyOrDie.com (WordPress 3.0+)
If you upload your videos or other media on one of these sites, then WordPress will automatically embed. Otherwise, you would have to post the embed code manually.
Why can’t I upload the videos to my WordPress?
Well you can, but we do not recommend you to do so. Most smaller blogs are on shared-hosting accounts and videos take a lot of server resource. If your video got tons of traffic, your site is more likely to crash. Second, you are missing out the traffic from YouTube users. We recommend that you pick a third party site such as Youtube, Vimeo etc to upload your videos. Read our full article on why you should never upload videos to WordPress.
Don’t forget to follow our YouTube channel.
I am having great difficulty getting a video to post on my WordPress blog. I’ve loaded it up to my youtube channel and then copy the URL from there. I paste into my NewPost, taking care to not have anything else on that same line. The video pops up in the edit box, but will not show on my blog when I come in from the outside, like any of you would do.
I’ve reviewed bunches of training sites that all say I am doing this correctly, and yet it won’t show. I called GoDaddy, since they are my blog host, but to no avail. They couldn’t help.
I even tried using the embed code and got the same results.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thank you for this video. Seems simple enough, but the video I want to embed in my Word Press template is from a news station’s website. It’s not on the white list and although you said we would have to use the embed code instead, you did not provide a link to how to use the embed code.
This was helpful, but I’m an idiot and need every single step spelled out for me…haha! What may be helpful for others looking for the solution, is more details on the link that you actually use on the wordpress page. It’s shown in the video but isn’t specifically explained. Don’t use the links that youtube gives you in the “share” option. Instead, copy and paste the actual url that is in your address bar of your browser.
where can I find website to post embed look like this
I’ve got the video embedded on my site. I’ve even set a thumbnail as a featured image! But on my blog page it shows both the thumbanil and the video when I just want the featured image to show up on the ‘recent posts’ bit. how do I do that?
I did this and it worked but I noticed that the email that gets sent to my followers do not show the videos. They would have to click on my actual website in order to see the videos. Does anyone else have this problem and how do you fix that? thanks!
Did you ever get an answer to this? I have the same problem. The email sent to followers doesn’t even show a broken link, People have no way of even knowing there is a video there that they can’t see.
Lyn and Kas, which plugin or service you are using to send out emails to your subscribers?
When I do Vimeo, the player doesn’t shrink to fit the div of my post, so it’s cropped one third of the player off the right hand side.
I tried the instructions here and it didn’t work.
I then tried what someone else suggested which is copying it elsewhere, into a document, and then copy and pasting that into wordpress – apparently that worked for others. Didn’t work for me.
I then simple copy and paste the basic URL into the post, no ’embed’ business, and voila!
Hopefully, it does actually work properly, so far so good
I have successfully embedded two videos from YouTube but views on WP are not reported in my YouTube stats. Do you know why?
make sure you embed the video and not copy and past the link from the platform you are using
my insert/edit video icon doesn’t work. Can somebody help me please?
Thanks for the post. It just worked after I had tried several plugins but failed. But the thumnail is too large for my theme. The video therefore distorts homepage appearence. How can I minimise the size of the thumnail
confused!
Whoa. I thought there would be more to it!
It works! Just like that.
Thanks a lot.
the link for the youtube video does not work!
Anyway, its ironic that you are showing how to embed a video, and the video you show is only a link, not an embedded video???
The link does not work, because it is not a valid link. It is an example of how to paste a link in a post to embed a youtube video. If you are interested in our YouTube videos please check out our YouTube Channel.
Simple is better and this is as simple as it gets. I love oEmbed!
If you could instruct me in English perhaps I may understand. How do I know whether it is hyperlinked or not?
The videos you embed on your site are not exactly hyperlinked. Instead, they are opened from youtube with in an iframe on your site.
Not worth a damn. How about people that don’t want to be a youtube whore?
You can use Vimeo, or one of the many other platforms that WordPress has built-in oEmbed support.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds#Okay.2C_So_What_Sites_Can_I_Embed_From.3F
Thank you. Worked like a charm
Okay, I did as you said and, even though I couldn’t see anything more than a yellow box, it was there. How about that.
Thank you!
Thank you very much for this post. I have tried embedding them I don’t know how many ways, then find this. Oh Duh! lol
“Well you can, but we do not recommend you to do so.”
So, how do you do it then? I’ll decide if I want to host it from my own site or not. I have a password protected site with only a few users. I do not want to make my video public. Hosting a 30 second clip is not going to crash the server.
If you have a handful of users and a short clip, sure go ahead and host it on your server. We would recommend going with Vimeo. Their plus feature which costs like $60 per year allows you to limit video embeds to a certain domain name. You can make it yoursite.com, and then have your site members only.
I consistently can’t embed videos on our blogs unless they are posted on YouTube. I am trying to embed a video from a public television station that provides embed code. Pasting the url does not work, using the embed code does not work. I tried pasting both into Notepad before pasting as a commeter above sugggested and that is not working. I have checked my settings to make sure auto-embed is enabled. Any other ideas?
If these public televisions are not using a popular service like Youtube, Vimeo, etc, then just pasting their URLs wouldn’t work. You would have to use their embed code. If it is iFrame embed code, then you should probably download one of the iframe plugins. If it is a Flash Player code, then you should be able to paste the code in your HTML tab of post editor. It should work just fine.
I’m trying to embed videos manually (unfortunately all the videos I want to post in my blog are not among the easy-to-embed ones that you’ve listed) but it doesn’t work.
If I copy and paste the link in the HTML page, it doesn’t do anything in the VISUAL page. What am I doing wrong? I’m downloading these videos and uploading them on my dailymotion page to avoid this problem but it’s time consuming and I really would like to just embed.
Any ideas?
If your embed is iFrame based, then use one of the iFrame plugins.
Iframe based videos don’t work either, not even with the iFrame plugin. Flashplayer code videos don’t work.
I’m considering migrating somewhere else, it takes less time than trying to figure how to do something that’s supposed to be easy, according to what WP support keeps telling us.
We’re using WordPress on our own server. Seems like it doesn’t do anything right. When I paste the url into the body, I leave a space above and a space below it. Nothing happens. My url is from a YouTube video that is public! I think it may have something to do with my lines disappearing between paragraphs. They are there when I’m editing but in the preview they are gone. Any know of a fix for that? Keep in mind I don’t really know code, so hopefully a fix that doesn’t involve messing with it.
First go to Settings > Media and make sure that auto-embeds are checked. If it is and it is still not working, then it could be a formatting error.
i have a similar problem. I go to Settings > Media, and the only thing it asks is the size limits for small, medium and large images. There is no mention of auto-embedding, there or elsewhere.
Is the problem that I’m trying to embed .mov files? It doesn’t seem to make a difference if I select Flash (which I used in the past) or QuickTime as a choice under the “embed media” shortcuts.
Help!
Hi Kristina!
I know I’m writing this a year and a half after you posted the above, but I’m having exactly the same youtube embed problems (no auto embedding option, etc)
Did you ever figure out the problem? If so, please let me know…I’m starting to get frustrated!
Thanks!
Niña
I Think this simple way for embed video, thanks for sharing
That’s really easy and nice….Thanks
My embedded videos disappear when I go back to a post to edit. Is there a plug-in that prevent this?
Doesn’t work for my when I do a straight cut and paste. I have to paste into Notepad, then recopy/pasted into WordPress. Why? Who knows. One of the myriad of foibles of WordPress that should be easy but are ball-tearingly frustrating.
Incredible! This really works. I spent hours trying to find a simple way to do this. Thanks a bunch.
but why there’s no sample how to embeded youtube or etc in here? is it me, or there is no video that shows up in here ?
No sample, because what is the point of showing the video showing up? All you have to do is paste the video URL.
Will embedding the video this way display properly in Google Reader?
And if the RSS is importing to Facebook notes, would additionally hyperlinking the code used to put the video in then break the embed that WP can do?
We always embed our videos this way, and haven’t had any issues from users complaining about misalignment or broken posts in google reader. If RSS is being served to Facebook, it would work perfectly fine, because WordPress is generating your RSS and it knows what to do with an embed code.
Wow, I had no idea! I’ll have to try this out. Thanks, WPB.