How to add video to your Website

It has been tested and proven that just adding one simple 1-minute video to your website can have an enormous impact on your overall user experience and average visit duration.

We already talked about the significance of good user experience, but why is visit duration so important? Well, for one – it tells search engines how interested people are in your site.

The longer visitors stay on your site (watching the video), the more Google thinks your site is relevant and the higher it ranks you in the search results. Sounds reasonable if you think about it – why would Google rank a website whose visitors leave within 3 seconds of visiting?

Secondly, videos can get you a lot of external traffic. If you create and publish a video on Youtube, it automatically gets exposed to billions of users worldwide and you never know when it can go viral and bring in hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to your website!

Thirdly, videos are very easy to use. You don’t even have to create your own video if you don’t want to, you can simply use any video on Youtube that’s relevant to your site – there is no copyright issues to worry about (unlike images).

In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to publish Youtube videos on your website.

Step 1 – Install a plugin called Smart Youtube PRO

To be perfectly honest, WordPress uses a very poor video implementation solution by itself (you can only post links to videos and not the actual videos…), that’s why I warmly suggest you install a great free plugin called Smart Youtube PRO.

It takes about 2 minutes to install and set it up and it’s a real life saver.

If you don’t already know how to do this, be sure to read our tutorial on how to install plugins.

Step 2 – Set up it up

One of the great things about Smart Youtube is that it is so easy to set up and it offers a whole range of useful features. For example, you can configure:

- video dimensions (size of the embedded video)
- autoplay feature (if you want the video to start automatically)
- loop videos (if you want the videos to loop)
- colorbox (you can design your own video frame)

And this is just a tiny fraction of the options available, so knock yourself out! Once you’re done setting up your configuration, remember to click »Update« and proceed to the next step.

Step 3 – Insert the video

This is the easiest part ever. All you need to do in order to insert a Youtube video on your post or page is add a “v” letter after the “http” part of the URL.

For example, if your Youtube video URL goes something like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlLdhaz14Yo

… then just add “v” after the http part so it looks like this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlLdhaz14Yo

Inside the page editor, you will only see a link and not the actual video itself, but once you update the page and refresh it inside your browser, it will be there!

If you wish to insert your video inside a sidebar widget (instead of the page or post), you can do that as well. Just select a new text widget and paste the modified URL insideI hope you’ve found this tutorial useful, if there’s anything else you’d like to ask me about adding videos to your website, please post a comment below. Thank you.