Many top brands are using background videos to make their landing pages more interesting. If used carefully, a moving background can instantly grab attention of your visitors. In this article, we will show you how to add YouTube video as fullscreen background in WordPress.
Video Tutorial
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First thing you need to do is install and activate the mb.YTPlayer for background videos plugin. Upon activation, head over to Settings » mb.YTPlayer to configure the settings.
Start by entering the URL of YouTube video you want to add as the background. The default options should work for most websites, but you can fine tune them to meet your needs.
You can add video controls, aspect ratio, video quality, start and end time, etc. You can also mute a video, show or hide controls, and loop a video.
Next, review the options and configure them as needed. Once you are satisfied, simply click on the save changes button to store your settings.
You can now preview your site to see the background video in action.
If you can’t see the video then your WordPress theme most likely has set a container with a background color or image.
In order to fix this, you will need to remove the background color from that container. You can do that by editing your theme’s stylesheet. Most commonly used identifiers for wrapper containers are page, site, content, etc.
Setting up YouTube Video Background for Single Post or Page
If you want to, you can set YouTube video background for a single post or page on your WordPress site. All you need to do is edit a post or page and click on the YTPlayer button on the post editor.
When you click on the button, it will bring up YTPlayer shortcode generator. It will show you most of the options on settings page. You need to enter the YouTube video URL and then go through the options. Once you are satisfied, click on the insert shortcode button.
The plugin will add the required shortcode into your post / page.
We hope this article helped you learn how to add YouTube video as background in WordPress. You may also want to checkout these useful YouTube tips to spice up your WordPress site with videos.
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Great article!
But I cannot add the video background to a single page, like you describe. I’m only able to add a youtube video to my homepage, which limits the extend to which the app can be used.
Ideas?
Hi, this plugin was a disaster to my website.
It consumed all the resources and for hours I was on the phone with my hosting company trying to battle why I was getting the errors on this screenshots below:
After hours, we finally traced them to the plugin i recently installed.
We had to remove it from the file manager and everything is back to normal now.
It takes up a lot of resources unless you have a super hosting account, i don’t advise.
Hi Tobi,
The plugin shouldn’t consume too many resources because it loads video from YouTube not from your website. The first screenshot you shared points to a database connection error. We hope everything works fine for you now, however, if you still see issues on your website then it is most likely a hosting issue.
Does it work with Avada?
Does it play on mobile phones?