With video marketing strategies already occupying a pivotal position in contemporary marketing, it is the time to insert videos into your articles to increase visitors’ average time spent on site thus improve your website or product ’s rankings in search engines.
If you are a website owner and blogger that regularly posts video content to your WordPress page, it’s extremely important that you get access to a reliable video plugin that you can use in embedding and displaying any types of videos on the articles, posts, and products.
There are a number of excellent WordPress video plugins available to bloggers but picking out the right one that you should be using is not always easy.
This is why I wrote this article to introduce you the following 10 Best WordPress plugin to quickly and easily embed HTML5 videos and Youtube/Vimeo videos into your posts and pages. Have fun.
Originally Published May 02 2019, updated Jan 29 2021
1. Embed Plus for YouTube – Gallery, Channel, Playlist, Live Stream
Total downloads: 200,000+
Five Star Ratings: 490+
This is a powerful, customizable Youtube plugin that help you easily embed Youtube videos, playlists, channels, galleries, and live streams into the WordPress website/blog.
More features:
- Compatible with the Gutenberg block editor.
- GDPR compliant.
- Works with the most WordPress themes.
- Shortcodes are supported as weoll.
2. WP Video Lightbox
Total downloads: 60,000+
Five Star Ratings: 65+
A mobile-friendly lightbox plugin which allows you to embed and display Youtube/Vimeo/HTML5 videos in a responsive modal popup with autoplay, deeplinking and navigation support.
The author of this plugin also provided a video to explain how the plugin works:
More features:
- Automatically retrieve the thumbnail for your video and embed in lightbox.
- Load YouTube video over https. This is great if you have SSL installed on your site.
- Disable suggested videos at the end of a YouTube video.
- Flexibility of using both shortcode/HTML code to pop up media in lightbox.
- Show description of a popup in overlay.
3. ARVE Advanced Responsive Video Embedder
Total downloads: 50,000+
Five Star Ratings: 150+
A responsive, easy-to-use and SEO-friendly WordPress video plugin for handling video (HTML5, Youtube, Vimeo…) embeds on your WordPress site.
Features:
- SEO friendly, lets you specify title, description, upload date to provide search engines with the schema.org data they like to have for better indexing.
- WYSIWYG support. No more messing around with shortcodes and previewing.
- Improved dialog for embedding videos.
- Magically makes those URL embedded videos responsive.
- No ‘lock in’ if do not use shortcodes and use providers WordPress already supports.
- Supports almost every video host that supports iframe embed codes.
- Embeds via pasting the URL in its own line just like WordPress!
- Optionally use very powerful Shortcodes instead.
- Clean shortcode syntax.
- One single button for all providers.
- Responsive embeds with CSS, much better than with JavaScript.
- Tries to be as unobtrusive as possible, sets ‘hide brand’ variables if supported, disables related videos at the end … to help keep people on your site rather then going to YouTube or keep watching videos.
- Autostart (for providers that support it, mobile browsers prevent this)
- Custom URL parameters to use all options providers offer.
- Optional maximal width.
- Video alignment.
- Detailed description of options in-place.
- Automatic detected and custom aspect ratio.
4. FV Flowplayer Video Player
Total downloads: 40,000+
Five Star Ratings: 60+
FV player is compatible with 98% of browsers available currently. The best part about using this is it can work as a host for HTML links, pre-roll ads, YouTube, Vimeo and more.
It comes with lightbox features and its overall completely compatible with a series of other video platforms. With searchable transcripts and a series of fantastic features, this truly is the future of WordPress plug-ins that you should be using for video.
5. Easy Video Player
Total downloads: 40,000+
Five Star Ratings: 50+
This WordPress plugin is designed to be a user-friendly WordPress video plug-in that can showcase self-hosted videos or videos that are linked to Youtube and other hosts. Although this plugin is extremely user-friendly it doesn’t offer the same level of compatibility or customization that are available in some of the other video plugins available for bloggers.
More features:
- Embed MP4 video into your website
- Embed responsive video for a better user experience while viewing from a mobile device
- Embed HTML5 video which are compatible with all major browsers
- Embed video with poster images
- Embed video with autoplay
- Embed video with loop
- Embed video with muted enabled
- Customize the video player using modifier classes
- Embed video using three different skins
- Embed video using MediaElement player or default WordPress video player
6. Video Gallery – YouTube Playlist, Channel Gallery
Total downloads: 30,000+
Five Star Ratings: 260+
Modern and mobile responsive video gallery. Easy embed videos from YouTube video playlist, channel and videos IDs to your WordPress website.
Features:
- Easy to embed playlist/ channel videos to WordPress post/page
- Custom layout for display videos
- Video gallery responsive
- Player with a large frame on top
- Player with popup/lightbox/modal with thumbnails
- Player responsive
- Pager and load more buttons
- Compatibility with page builders via Shortcode Generator
- Styling settings: buttons color, buttons style
7. WP YouTube Lyte
Total downloads: 30,000+
Five Star Ratings: 140+
A tiny and performant Youtube embed plugin to embed Youtube videos with a lazy load functionality into your WordPress. The plugin can be configured to cache YouTube thumbnails locally, improving both performance and privacy.
8. Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator
Total downloads: 20,000+
Five Star Ratings: 50+
A responsive video embed plugin which makes it easier to play user uploaded videos in a responsive, auto-resizing, cross-browser HTML5 video player with thumbnail support.
9. Video PopUp
Total downloads: 20,000+
Five Star Ratings: 30+
Video Popup plugin lets you to make video lightbox popup easily. YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, and MP4 self hosted video are supported, and you can display Popup Video on page load.
10. Video Gallery and Youtube Gallery
Total downloads: 10,000+
Five Star Ratings: 110+
A video gallery plugin which displays Youtube/Vimeo/HTML5 videos in a fully responsive gallery lightbox.
Features:
- Supports unlimited videos.
- 8 Advanced views.
- Supports playlist.
- Titles & Descriptions.
- Load More and Pagination.
More Resources:
If you are looking for more plugins to enhance the video experience on your website, don’t forget to check out the Video section.
If you have suggestions or more plugin recommendations, please let me know.
I am using buddypress and would like to have another buddypress profile tab that will display a gallery of youtube videos (for example, the last 10 videos the member added to their youtube channel) for that member.
Any ideas on how to accomplish this? Is this possible with one of the plugins above?
I was thinking I could capture their youtube related info that one of these plugins requires via BP Extended profiles, and I know how to add another buddypress tab, with a shortcode. But not sure how to feed each members youtube info to the shortcode dynamically.
Not sure if Im on the right track or if there is a better way.