How to Embed Video

Embedding Video in WordPress

Do your YouTube videos disappear in WordPress? Do you embed a video only to find that it has vanished when you reopen that page to edit it?

Don’t worry, you didn’t delete it and you’re not really doing anything wrong. WordPress just changed the way videos are embedded…and they didn’t tell you. WordPress continues to improve its functionality and ease of use with every upgrade, but sometimes these changes are not intuitive or even explained clearly to users.

One such improvement is the way in which WordPress lets you embed a YouTube video in a post. The old method of embedding video in WordPress In the past, we copied the “embed code” from YouTube and pasted it in the HTML editor window of a WordPress post or we used a Plugin that simplified this action. The YouTube embed code looked something like this:

The best part of using this embed code from YouTube is that it would let you define the size of your video form 2” to 1280”, as the image below indicates.

WordPress changed the way videos are now embedded

With the WordPress latest upgrade all that is required to embed a video is to paste the URL of the YouTube video on a single line as illustrated below:

WordPress changed the way videos are now embedded

There is one potentially big formatting issue with this default option and that is that WordPress will display the video to automatically match the width of your theme. A problem arises when your theme is using columns, which can have your video extending beyond the width of your content column.

The illustration below shows how a video may display over your sidebars.

Sizing videos to fit your content column

The good news is that there is an easy fix for this. Under your WP Dashboard, scroll down to the ‘Settings’ tab and click the ‘Media’ item. Under the ‘Media Settings’ you will see a box where you can set the embed width and height.

Sizing videos to fit your content column

That’s all there is to it!

Once you have set this up, embedding a video in your WordPress site becomes easy. Remember that Google takes note of how long a visitor remains on your page and nothing keeps a page ‘sticky’ as a good video.