Using a WordPress website you can embed videos from a variety of video hosting services. Unless you really know what you are doing, using a video hosting service will give you much better quality results than hosting your own video, as they can take care of the wide range of display devices and video formats far better than you can on your own.
Here are several services that are useful with a self hosted WordPress site.
Vimeo
With the advent of the Vimeo Pro edition, for $199/yr you can get HD/full screen video playback with great player customisation.
Free Vimeo accounts are also available – they are ad-supported, and your videos need to be non-commercial to match Vimeo’s TOS.
YouTube
- Get the URL for the YouTube video – watch the video on the YouTube site and you’ll see a URL panel to the top right of the video. Copy the URL (not the embed)
- In your web page or post, paste the URL
Note YouTube accounts are free but are supported by ads – you don’t have control over which ads will display with your videos.
Here is how a directly embedded YouTube link looks:
And this is the result.
Creating and uploading your own video
You can create your own video (or get someone to do it for you) and then upload your video to YouTube. Once on YouTube, it is an easy task to add it to your website.
A lot of people search for video content using YouTube, and your video may draw traffic in its own right. Your post or page will still be indexed by Google, and provides a second chance for your content to be indexed and rank.
To create your own YouTube account, go to YouTube.com and click on the Sign Up link. Once you have an account, follow the Upload Video links to upload your video.
Wistia
A newish video hosting offering, with the added benefit of making it easy to integrate your video into your Campaign Monitor email campaigns (read the Campaign Monitor blog post).
$79/mth for video hosting, $99/mth for the Deluxe plan with email integration.
Viddler
A commercial Viddler account starts at around $100/mth.
Bright Cove
A Bright Cove account starts at around $100/mth.
Other Embeddable Video Services
For the services listed below, you can copy the URL of the video and paste it directly in to your web page:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Viddler
- DailyMotion
- blip.tv
- Hulu (US Only)
- Qik
- Google Video
- WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)