WordPress is primarily a text- and image-focused content management system, but there’s no reason a business shouldn’t add video to its content publishing mix. As we’ll see, video drives engagement and increases dwell time. Many users also prefer video over text when consuming content.
However, adding video to your WordPress site requires more consideration than publishing blog articles and landing pages. The choices you make about how to host and display video files will affect your site’s performance, SEO, hosting costs, and the experience visitors have when they watch your content.
In this article, we’ll explore the technical and strategic decisions involved in adding video to WordPress sites. You’ll learn which approaches create problems, which WordPress features support video content, and how to choose a video hosting solution that matches your business needs and technical capabilities.
Video content delivers measurable benefits for business websites. Many consumers prefer watching videos to reading instructional or promotional content. Pages with videos show dramatically higher engagement. Increased dwell time may also signal content quality to search engines, and it creates more opportunities for conversion. For lead generation sites, the impact is significant: landing pages with video can see conversion rate increases of up to 80%.
Business websites commonly use video for:
WordPress includes a dedicated Video block for embedding videos directly on your pages and posts. To use it, you upload video files to the WordPress Media Library just as you would upload images. The Video block displays them with standard playback controls, including play/pause, volume adjustment, and full-screen options.
For businesses publishing a small number of videos to sites with moderate traffic, uploading videos directly to WordPress and embedding them via the Video block can work. However, for sites with lots of videos and visitors, there are technical and cost implications that make alternative solutions preferable.
While the Video block makes uploading videos technically straightforward, self-hosting video files on your WordPress server can degrade site performance and increase hosting costs. Video files are large: a single five-minute 1080p video can exceed 500 MB. 4K videos are larger still, often more than 1 GB for a short video. Each view consumes significant bandwidth.
At Pressable, we offer unlimited bandwidth, but if a video is particularly popular or you have a high-traffic site, video streaming can exhaust the available network capacity, degrading the user experience for all visitors.
The solution is hosting your videos externally and embedding them on your WordPress site. Third-party video hosting delivers better performance, lower costs, and enhanced user experiences. Let’s look at the three main video hosting options.
WordPress includes a YouTube embed block that makes it easy to show videos from YouTube or similar platforms. You just paste the video URL. This approach works well if you have a YouTube channel and want to extend that presence to your website.
This is a convenient option, but there are some downsides. Free YouTube accounts inject ads into your videos, which creates an unprofessional experience on business sites. Additionally, relying on free platforms means you have to accept their terms, which can change. Platform policy shifts could affect how your videos display or whether certain content remains permitted.
Technical teams can deploy video hosting infrastructure on cloud platforms like AWS S3 with CloudFront. The cloud approach is flexible and can scale to handle large video libraries.
But cloud platform video hosting requires significant technical expertise and ongoing management. Configuration complexity, CDN setup, and cost optimization demand development resources that many businesses lack. Cloud hosting makes sense primarily for agencies managing multiple video-heavy WordPress sites.
Dedicated video hosting services provide the best balance of performance, features, and convenience for most businesses. They handle video storage, encoding, and delivery through content delivery networks while providing WordPress integration.
Jetpack VideoPress offers professional video hosting designed specifically for WordPress sites. VideoPress delivers videos through a global CDN, supports 4K resolution, and includes a dashboard for managing video libraries. Most importantly for business sites, VideoPress doesn’t inject ads into your content.
Pressable’s Premium Site Plans offer VideoPress as part of the included Jetpack Complete suite, which provides professional video hosting without separate subscriptions or per-video fees.
Beyond choosing the right hosting solution, two strategies can significantly improve your video content’s search visibility and user engagement.
Search engines cannot effectively index audio or video content, and transcripts make your video content searchable and indexable. In the past, transcripts were laborious and expensive to generate, but today, there are AI-powered services that produce accurate transcripts that you can embed on WordPress sites as formatted text.
Once you have a transcript, it’s straightforward to add captions to any video. Captions make videos more accessible for visitors with hearing impairments and those who prefer to watch videos with the sound off. VideoPress makes it easy to add captions to your WordPress videos.
Schema.org VideoObject markup helps search engines understand your video content and display it as rich results with thumbnails, durations, and descriptions. Pages with schema markup see a 30% increase in click-through rates compared to standard listings.
WordPress plugins like Yoast Video SEO, Rank Math, and Schema Pro can automatically add correctly formatted schema markup to your embedded videos.
Pressable’s managed WordPress hosting provides a secure, high-performance foundation for media-rich WordPress sites and WooCommerce stores. Pressable is an Automattic company, and our hosting platform is built on the same ultra-reliable cloud infrastructure as WordPress.com and WP VIP. Every WordPress hosting plan includes automatic scaling, a global content delivery network, and our easy-to-use control panel.
Discover our full range of WordPress hosting features or schedule a demo to learn more.
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