Our Guide To Video Use on A WordPress Website
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 19 seconds.
29th December 2022
Visual marketing has taken off over the last decade, with the rise of Instagram stories, YouTube and most recently TikTok. Also, the use of videos which explain or sell a service/product has become a helpful tool in marketing and consumer engagement.
For this blog post, we look at how to effectively utilise the power of video on your WordPress website. However, including videos on your website may use up a lot of storage space and bandwidth, driving up your hosting prices and degrading the user experience for your visitors.
We advise against ever adding videos to your WordPress website because of this. The easiest technique to add movies to your website and all the reasons why you should never upload a video to WordPress is covered in this post.
What is the difference between embed and uploading?
Before we explain why you should never host or upload movies to WordPress, let’s ensure that everyone knows how embedding is different to uploading.
When you upload or host a video, you add it to your website using the WordPress media library, just like a picture is uploaded. This places the video directly within the website. This is the section that we strongly advise against.
It is easier to share and get more interactions
Embedding means you upload it on a third-party site like YouTube, and then you can easily embed it in your blog posts via a simple piece of sharing code. We only use this method in all our website builds and strongly recommend you do too.
WordPress allows you to embed videos far more easily than you can upload them. By simply pasting the URL in your blog entries, you can share a video that has been uploaded to YouTube or another video-sharing website.
Additionally, managing a YouTube channel is simpler. However, setting up a video area independently from your images and other files in WordPress is more complex. A video you post to WordPress will be incorporated with all your other media library items. You can make it simpler for your viewers to share your film and even help it go viral by publishing it to YouTube and other video-sharing websites.
Keep Your Website Performing Well
You will incur bandwidth costs when you upload videos to your website. Higher quality need more bandwidth, this is not only an added expense to you, but it also costs you rankings with google.
When viewers embed your videos on their websites, the bandwidth used to view the video on those websites increases. Additionally, you’ll probably need to add other plugins to organise and show your movies. If these plugins aren’t speed-optimized, they could potentially put more strain on your server. Your host will likely suspend and briefly remove your website if you use shared web hosting.
WordPress site performance optimisation is more crucial than ever because it influences both your SEO rankings and website traffic.
Better Video Quality
Each video that is uploaded to websites like YouTube or Vimeo is processed for a better online viewing experience. Viewers have the option of seeing your video in HD or at a reduced resolution. Additionally, in order to play the video in the greatest quality for the viewer, these websites make an automatic effort to determine a user’s internet connection and device type. If you submit your video to WordPress, the optimisations are lost, and your video will play back in its original form, using up more bandwidth and reducing user experience.Further Questions?
We hope we have answered some of the questions you may have about how to best use video on your WordPress website; if you have any further questions, please feel free to email our team at info@elementmedia.uk.
We would love to help you with any business or website needs you may have.