Add A Video To Your Website - IN-DEPTH GUIDE - DRILL DOWN TO THE WONDERS OF WORDPRESS - WordPress To Go - How To Build A WordPress Website On Your Own Domain, From Scratch, Even If You Are A Complete Beginner (2013)

WordPress To Go - How To Build A WordPress Website On Your Own Domain, From Scratch, Even If You Are A Complete Beginner (2013)

IN-DEPTH GUIDE - DRILL DOWN TO THE WONDERS OF WORDPRESS

Lesson 10. Add A Video To Your Website

Videos are now a popular feature of many websites and WordPress makes it quite easy to include them in posts or pages.

For reasons which I explain in the FAQ below, I do not recommend that you upload videos to your Media Library. Instead, I suggest that you upload the video to YouTube (or one of the other white-listed video-sharing websites) and link to it from your website.

WordPress now provides a very easy way to display a video on your website from third-party video sites. Here’s how.

First of all, find the YouTube (or wherever) video that you want to use (yours or someone else’s) and click on it:

In your browser’s menu bar you will see the URL of your chosen video. It will look something like this:

Copy this URL to your clipboard.

Then go to the post or page where you want to display the video and, on a line of its own, paste the URL of the video just where you want the video to appear.

Don’t make this into a hyperlink: just leave it as a line in the text.

WordPress knows that this is an approved video site and will translate the URL into an embedded video. Magic, or what?

When you view the page it will look something like Figure 10.2:

The frame of the video is shown in the content of the post/page and when the visitor clicks on the ‘Play’ button the sound and picture plays from YouTube.

FAQ

How can I add a video that I recorded myself?

It is possible to embed your own video files into a WordPress website but you do need to be aware that videos can be very large files and there is a file size limit of 8 megabytes that you can upload via WordPress into your Media Library. This restriction severely limits your options for displaying self-hosted videos.

And, because video files are usually very large and eat up bandwidth, if you have a basic hosting plan you may find that your hosting provider will want to charge you extra if you want to host your own videos on your own website.

The easiest way to show videos on your site is to upload the file to YouTube or Flickr (or any of the many other free video hosting sites) and use the code that they provide (as example shown above) to embed the file into your post or page as shown above. But if you really do need commercial video hosting there is always Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com) who, for a fee, will provide a powerful video serving facility that is used by many of top-name webmasters.

If you don’t want to do it this way and your file size is less than 8mb then I suggest you search for plugins that will do the job (see Lesson 15). I won’t recommend any particular plugin because there are new ones coming out all the time and they all differ in what they can do and how. But spend some time experimenting with plugins until you find what you want.

Be aware that you may need to use HTML to do this job and so you should also study Lesson 19 where I show you how to do this.

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In the next lesson we’ll be looking at how to enhance your website with text widgets. This cool feature gives you endless options of adding more functionality and making your site unique.