Rule of thumb: don’t host your own videos

WordPress gives you the ability to upload videos to your media library and insert them into your content just like you would insert an image. But unless your video is very small (only a few seconds), this is generally not a good idea. Video files tend to be very large and take a relatively long time to upload and download. So when someone is visiting one of your pages with a video on there that you added to your media library, it’s going to take a while for the page to load. Also, backups of your site become muuuuch bigger and become more difficult to manage when you’re uploading videos to your media library.

A better way: embedding your videos (and it’s easy too)

The best way of showing videos on your site is by embedding them from YouTube or Vimeo. These services specialize in videos and are completely set up for it with specialized servers. If you embed a video from YouTube for example, it will load very quickly for your visitors and keep your media library much more manageable.

And it’s very easy too. If you already have a Gmail account, you can use that to login to YouTube as well.
To get started all you need to do is go to YouTube and click the upload button at the top right of your screen.

Once your video is uploaded, you can embed it on your own website in several ways.

To add video to a blog post  just copy and paste your video URL on its own line on a page of your website  and the video will be displayed in your post. This is the URL of the video that you need to copy:

You can also paste the video URL into a Text Module, or any other Module that has a text editor included, such as a Toggle.  Just copy and paste your video URL on its own line:

Finally there is the Video Module, this allows you to create beautiful overlays for your videos. See here for more info on using the video module. For the videos in this classroom we’ve used Video Modules.

Video privacy

If you’d like to keep your video private, for example if you only want to show it to people who have subscribed to your newsletter, and you don’t want it to be found on YouTube, then you can set it as “unlisted”.  See the YouTube documentation here to learn how to do that.

Professional Video Embedding Solutions

If you are just starting out, or if video is not such an important part of your biz, or if you intend your videos to spread the word about your products and services , then YouTube videos are a great option. If you will be creating a lot of videos and protecting their content is very important, for example because they are part of a course you are creating, then a professional service like Vimeo can be very useful. We use Vimeo to host all our videos and we’re very happy with their service and protection. See the Vimeo  website for more info.

Embedding Audio in your Website

Just like for video, it’s best to embed audio files from somewhere else (instead of uploading them to your own website). Uploading your audio files to SoundCloud and embedding them is good way to present your audio on your website. In the video below you’ll learn how to embed SoundCloud audio files: