Adding videos to your website is a great way to increase visitor engagement and time spent on your site. The process for adding videos varies based on the platform your website operates on. Let’s look at the two most commonly used platforms to help you upload video to your website.

Adding Video to your WordPress website

Uploading video using a WordPress platform is very simple and gives you a lot of options when it comes to customizing and optimizing the content. There are two ways that you can upload a video to your WordPress website.

Using a URL to upload video onto your website

1. Find the video you want to embed (add) to your website.
2. In one of the corners you will see a share button, click this and copy the URL that is displayed.
3. Navigate to the page or post that you wish to add the video to. Select the “Add Media” tab just above the toolbar and click “Add Video”
4. Paste the link on the Visual tab that is displayed and click Select.

From here, the video should appear in the body of your post. To make changes, click the video and then find the pencil in the tool bar that pops up. This is where you can edit the videos caption and positioning on the page.

Uploading a video to WordPress – Advanced

For those who are more advanced (or more adventurous) with WordPress, there are some great customization options like removing suggested videos from the video.

1. Choose a video to embed just like you did in the example above.
2. Click ‘Embed’ and then click ‘Show more.’ You will see a box that is checked by the sentence ‘Show suggested videos when the video finishes’.
   • o Unchecking that will allow your video to go back to your thumbnail when it’s done playing. If you keep the box selected, YouTube will automatically suggest other videos (from other users).
   • o This section is also where you can adjust privacy controls.
3. Find the HTML code right below ‘Embed’ and copy it.
4. Navigate to the page or post that you wish to add the video to. On the top right of the text box you will see two tabs: Visual and Text. Click the Text tab
5. Paste the entire HTML code into the Text tab.

Navigate back to the visual tab and you will see the video in your post. Keep in mind you need the entire code when doing this method, not just the link like you used in the simpler method above.

Adding Video to Website Builders “drag-and-drop” platforms

For drag-and-drop website builder templates like Wix or Squarespace the process is fairly straightforward. However, as we have discussed in previous articles, there are some disadvantages to using these kinds of platforms. You can read more about those here.

When you are logged into your websites backend, you will need to upload for video into the “video library”. To do this, you need the video’s URL. For YouTube, this can be found when you click the share button.

Just like with YouTube, you will want to copy the video URL for other videos you wish to add from, for example, Facebook.

If the video is on your computer, simply hover over the “Add Video” option on your dashboard, and select to “add from computer”. From here, simply choose the video to add and click select.

Once the video is in your Video Library you have the option to edit it. The features you can edit are the starting point or cropping the length. You can also edit the Video’s alt text for SEO.

By adding videos into your Video Library, you will be able to organize them into Channels. This is a great feature especially if you have a lot of video content that you need to categorize.

Now that you have your videos in the Video Library, you select which video you want to go where. If you want a video playing in the background of your website, you can do that too!