How To Embed Youtube Videos in WordPress
Say you come across a youtube video that you’d like to post to your site or you have a video of your own that you’ve posted to youtube. Here are the steps you’ll need to take to accomplish that.
(You can click any of the images used below to see a larger more readable version)
To begin with it usually easiest to have two browser windows open. In one window you’ll want to be logged into your wordpress site and the other browser you’ll want to have your youtube video of choice up.
Once you have both browsers up we’ll start out on the wordpress side of things. If you have a story or some text to go along with the video it’s best to go ahead and enter that in first. It’ll make it easier for you to decide where to place the video.
Once your story is in place we’ll switch over to the Youtube video. Below the video you’ll notice a couple of buttons thumbs up, thumbs down, share and embed. You’ll want to click on embed.
When you click the embed button you’ll notice some new options will now be displayed.
The only thing we’re mainly concerned with here is the size. Generally speaking for most sites the smallest option (560×349) is going to be the best choice. You don’t want the video to be too big and overlap into other areas of your site.
Once you’ve chosen the size you want to select to snippet of code that being displayed in the box above and copy it. We’re now done with the youtube portion of this so we’ll head back over to the wordpress post.
At the top of the post in the upper right-hand corner you’ll notice two tabs, Visual and HTML. By default Visual will be selected, you’ll want to choose HTML.
You should still see you’re story, but it may look slightly different. Formatting may have changed and you might see some html tags that you didn’t when visual was selected. No worries though this is to be expected.
For my example I just want the video player to be displayed right below the text of my post so I position my cursor there and then I paste in the code. After that you’re pretty much done. If you have categories or tags to choose as wel as anything else you need to do, go ahead and do that, then just hit publish and you’re done.
(If you click back to the visual tab you won’t be able to see the video while you’re still viewing your story in the back end of wordpress. In some cases I’ve see the code disappear when doing this as well. If this happens you’ll simply need to re-paste it back in)
