5+ Picture-Perfect WordPress YouTube Plugins
If a picture is worth 1000 words, how much is a video worth? Video is a great way to convey your message, and it also improves your SEO score. Of course, simply adding a video is very easy, but you should also take a look at these WordPress YouTube plugins (YouTube being by far the most popular platform for online video) for WordPress for some extra features. Maybe one if these plugins is just the thing you need to make your website exactly what you want it to be.
Embed Plus for YouTube is certainly a way to include YouTube videos into your website, but it is also much more than that. The plugin provides you with a special block for Gutenberg block editor, which you can use to embed not only a video, but also a playlist, stream, a channel into your page.
This plugin also allows you to control whether your visitors can play more than one video on any one page, and to control where a playlist starts when playing form your page. You can also set up the videos to play on a loop, hide controls except on hover, or make your embedded media responsive and adaptable to mobile devices, too.
Why Embed Plus for YouTube could be great for you:
- GDPR Compliant
- Continuous Play
- Modest Branding
WP YouTube Lyte provides you with a neat and useful trick: “lazy“ loading. A “lite“ embed looks exactly like an embedded video, except it will only fully activate the actual video when selected. This means that your page loading time will be significantly shorter, especially if multiple videos are embedded into the same page.
You can also use this plugin to embed only audio from YouTube videos, play a smaller version of the video, or embed a whole playlist. If you are concerned with your visitors‘ privacy, you can set up the plugin to cache YouTube thumbnails locally. This means that YouTube will not receive requests unles your visitors specifically select the embedded video.
Why WP YouTube Lyte for YouTube could be great for you:
- No 3rd Party Tracking Software
- Fast Loading
Widget Responsive for YouTube offers you several ways of modifying the functionality of the embedded YouTube video. For one, you can choose when the video starts or ends, which we found especially useful if you are only interested in a small bit of the video as illustration to the text, play the video on a loop, hide the progress bar, YouTube logo and title, and several other options.
This plugin can also embed a YouTube video on your sidebar, and also allow you some colour modifications for a better fit to your website.
Why Widget Responsive for YouTube could be great for you:
- Colour Options
- Mute Video On Start
- Video Description
- Full Screen Option
Video Gallery, again, does more than just simply embed videos: as the name suggests, it creates galleries. With the free version, you can create a simple gallery from videos from a channel, playlist, or user, and lay it out in a grid, as a list, or a combination. This plugin will also let you play your videos in popups or in a lightbox, if you feel that works best for your website.
The premium version comes with other layout options, such as carousels and masonry, as well as a slew of other options: hover icons, video meta data, and title and description replacement, to name a few.
Why Video Gallery – YouTube Playlist, Channel Gallery by YotuWP could be great for you:
- Responsive
- Style Settings
- Popup and Lighbox
- Big Player Layout (Premium Only)
ARVE is a video embedding plugin that works for more than just YouTube, which is an important thing to bear in mind. It is very user-friendly, but, more importantly, SEO friendly, with options to specify titles and descriptions, and, crucially, schema.org data for better indexing.
Its video options are somewhat limited, but the Pro version offers the options for lazy loading, lightboxed videos, different hover and icon styles, and also a feature which lets you show the last video from a channel, with regular updates so you don‘t need to reset it every time.
Why ARVE Advanced Responsive Video Embedder could be great for you:
- Multiple Video Host Support
- Expand On Click (Pro Only)
- Responsive Thumbnails (Pro Only)
This Video Gallery plugin does exactly what it says on the tin: it is an easy way to generate a grid or a gallery of videos on your webpage. It also provides for easy creation of YouTube video pages on your WordPress website, with WordPress comments enabled, too.
The central options for this plugin are the two gallery layouts. The gallery gives you page navigation after every 8 videos, with video thumbnails at the bottom, while the grid layout is a 4-column responsive layout with page navigation after every 16.
Why Video Gallery WordPress Plugin for YouTube could be great for you:
- Easy To Use
- Easy To Set Up
Finally, we give you WP Video Popup – for when you really want to draw your visitors‘ eyes to the video. This plugin provides you with a shortcode you can use to embed a responsive video lightbox popup into your page or template. This video may be hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, started whenever you like, muted or played with sound, and the plugin also supports Vimeo‘s portrait mode.
With the Pro version, you can also use the plugin to create video galleries, play self-hosted videos, create video galleries, play a video immediately after a page is loaded, and more.
Why Video Gallery WordPress Plugin for YouTube could be great for you:
- Easy To Use
- Easy To Set Up
In Conclusion
Supplying your content with video will make it more appealing to the eye, and more interesting and informative to your visitors. With these WordPress YouTube plugins, you can make the video be more than just a tack-on – you can make it fit your other content and your website‘s general style.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
