A WordPress video plugin helps you embed videos on your website or prepare a slideshow of self-hosted videos. In this blog, we have listed the seven best WordPress video plugins for 2023.
Videos are the most popular form of online content, especially short videos, as every platform from social media, emails, and messaging services to websites uses them in one form or another. Figure this out - 60% of the internet traffic revolves around videos!
For businesses and marketers, creating and uploading videos has many benefits. They are easy to share, they maximize engagement, and they get in a ton of mileage! For websites or online stores, videos bring in the moolah. They are an engaging way to provide information. They do, for sure, bring in conversions and profits.
If you have your website on WordPress, you can easily embed videos or upload self-hosted videos with the help of WordPress Video plugins. What is a WordPress video plugin? Why do you need it? In this blog, we answer your questions and also list the 7 best WordPress video plugins you can consider for your site.
What is a WordPress video plugin?
A WordPress video plugin is a software extension or add-on that integrates with the WordPress content management system (CMS) to enhance its video-related functionalities. These plugins provide additional features and tools that allow you to easily embed, manage, and display videos on your WordPress website.
Why use a WordPress video plugin?
If you keenly observe Gen Z, you’ll see them preoccupied with short videos on their mobiles all the time. You can see this format on all the social media channels, such as Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook. Even though YouTube was popular for its long-format videos, it quickly adopted the shorter format to be relevant to the audience. So, if you are wondering why you should use a WordPress video plugin for your website, we have some answers.
To enhance engagement
According to research by Wyzowl, 84% of consumers have been convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand's video. By embedding videos on your website, you encourage visitors to stay longer and explore your content and products.
To improve conversion rates
Did you know that inserting a video on your landing page can increase conversions by 80%? By creating compelling product demos, customer testimonials, or explainer videos, you can boost your conversion rates and drive more sales.
To improve online visibility
Having a video on your website increases the likelihood of appearing on the first page of Google search results by 53 times! If your video plugin has features to optimize the video metadata, make use of them to make it easier for search engines to understand your content and index it.
To reach mobile device users
Mobile devices account for a significant portion of online traffic. A WordPress video plugin ensures that the videos are responsive, providing an optimal viewing experience and keeping mobile users engaged.
To easily manage videos
Having a video plugin simplifies the process of managing and embedding videos on your WordPress site. You can upload videos, organize them into galleries or playlists, and embed them into your posts or pages without coding.
To gain insights
If the plugin offers an analytics feature, you can gather data on metrics such as video views and engagement to better understand the preferences of your audiences.
Moreover, video plugins offer integration with popular video hosting platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitch to leverage their features and improve the user experience on your website.
How can you use the video plugin on your WordPress website?
Okay, now that you know why you should use a video plugin, let us see in what ways you can use it to enhance the content and improve conversions on your site.
Product demonstrations
This will allow potential customers to see the product in action, understand its features, and make more informed purchasing decisions.
Tutorials and how-to videos
If you offer products or services that require instructions or tutorials, you can create tutorial videos to help your audience better understand how to use your offerings.
Customer testimonials
Showcase videos of satisfied customers sharing their positive experiences with your products or services to add credibility and build trust.
Video blogs or vlogs
If you run a blog or regularly create video content, embed it directly into your blog posts to keep visitors engaged.
Webinars or online courses
Embed recorded sessions or course modules directly on your website to create a seamless learning experience for your audience and encourage them to engage with your educational content.
Event coverage or live streaming
Embed live streams or recorded coverage of the events on your website to allow those who couldn't attend to still experience them.
Brand storytelling
Create videos that share your brand's story, showcase your mission and values, or provide a glimpse behind the scenes to connect with your audience on a deeper level.
Video portfolios
If you're an artist, designer, or creative professional, embed videos that display your portfolio, highlight your projects, or provide visual representations of your skills and expertise.
Recommended videos
Display related or recommended videos alongside your main content for cross-promotion and upselling by showcasing complementary products, accessories, or additional services.
Choose a video plugin that aligns with your goals and offers the necessary features to fulfill your requirements.
What are the features of a WordPress video plugin?
We hope that you are now aware of how you can use a video plugin for your website. If you are convinced about having a video plugin for your site, the next task is to pick one from the WordPress plugin repository. To select the best one, you need to know the features generally present in a WordPress video plugin.
Video embedding
You can easily embed videos from various sources, such as YouTube, Vimeo, or self-hosted videos, directly into your WordPress posts, pages, or custom post types. It provides a shortcode or block that you can insert into your content to simplify the process of video embedding.
Video playback customization
It offers options to customize the video player's appearance, including player skins, colors, sizes, and control options to suit your website branding.
Responsive design
It ensures that the embedded videos automatically adjust their size and layout to fit different screen sizes and devices.
Video galleries and playlists
Many video plugins enable you to create video galleries or playlists, allowing you to organize and present multiple videos in a visually appealing and user-friendly manner.
Video SEO optimization
Some plugins provide features to optimize your videos for search engines. This includes options for adding video metadata, such as titles, descriptions, and tags.
Video analytics and tracking
Advanced video plugins may offer analytics and tracking features to gather insights into how your videos are being viewed and interacted with.
Monetization options
Certain plugins provide monetization features, such as video ads or the ability to restrict video content to paid subscribers. These features can help you generate revenue from your videos or offer exclusive content to your customers.
When selecting a plugin, consider factors such as user ratings, reviews, compatibility with your WordPress version, regular updates, and the level of support provided by the plugin developer.
WordPress video plugins are available in the official WordPress Plugin Directory as well as from third-party sources. But here, in this blog, we list the best WordPress video plugins available in the WordPress plugin store.
Build An Engaging App For Free
1. Smart Slider 3
Active Installations - 900,000+
Smart Slider3 is a powerful plugin to create fully responsive and SEO-optimized sliders for your website. Among many of its features, one is that it allows you to use self-hosted MP4 videos on your website in three ways - as a layer, slide background, or slider background. This flexibility allows you to incorporate your own videos seamlessly into your video sliders.
The free version supports adding videos from Vimeo and YouTube, making it suitable for most users. Smart Slider 3 ensures that your video sliders are fully responsive, meaning they adapt and display correctly on different screen sizes and devices. The plugin provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface to simplify the process of designing and customizing your video sliders.
Features
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You can create fullscreen video backgrounds either as a hero header or within sections with a parallax scrolling effect.
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You have the option to use your own video by uploading an MP4 file to your WordPress website or by entering the URL of a YouTube or Vimeo video.
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Smart Slider 3 enables you to enhance the video background by adding multiple layers to your video block, such as text, buttons, logos, and thumbnails.
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The plugin provides settings to customize the video background by adjusting video opacity, muting sound, and looping the video playback.
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You can insert your video block into any page or post using the provided shortcode or by adding a snippet of PHP code directly into your site's template file.
Pricing
While you can download it for free for your WordPress site, you’ll have to subscribe to its paid plan, starting at $49, to access its premium features.
2. Premium Addons for Elementor
Active Installations - 700,000+
The Premium Addons for Elementor plugin has 60+ customizable widgets and 400+ premade templates to enhance your website built using the Elementor Page Builder plugin. One of its widgets is the Video Box, which, thankfully, is included in its free plan.
This Video Box widget in the Premium Addons for Elementor plugin allows you to add playable videos to your website pages using Elementor without the need for coding skills. The Video Box widget has been tested on various browsers and smart devices to ensure optimal performance and compatibility.
Features
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Insert videos from popular platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion, or upload your own custom videos using the self-hosted video type.
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The widget offers a range of customization options to tailor the appearance and behavior of your videos.
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The widget now includes the option to apply masks to videos, allowing for unique and creative video shapes.
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With the "Background Image" option, you can present videos within a device frame, controlling placement, height, and other aspects for an engaging visual effect.
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It supports showcasing YouTube Playlists on your website, with options to customize the number of columns, featured video appearance, and number of videos displayed.
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The widget offers two types of popups (Prettyphoto and Elementor Light-box) to display videos in overlay popups, providing a visually appealing and user-friendly experience.
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With the Sticky Video feature, you can make specific videos remain visible on the screen while visitors scroll through other content, ensuring the video stays in view and captures attention.
Pricing
The Video Box widget is available for free if you download the Premium Addons for Elementor plugin for WordPress. But if you want to access some premium features, subscribe to its paid plan, starting at $39 for a single user.
3. Meta Slider
Slider, Gallery, and Carousel by MetaSlider – Responsive WordPress Slideshows
Active Installations - 600,000+
MetaSlider is basically a slider plugin for your WordPress site. It helps you create slides, carousels, and galleries to display images and videos.
You can easily include responsive, high-definition YouTube and Vimeo videos in your slideshows. You can also create slideshows of self-hosted videos from the library. You can pick from its ready-to-use slider templates and CSS3 transitions to create customized and engaging slides.
Features
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You can embed Vimeo videos on your slides with the Vimeo Slides feature. It is compatible with MetaSlider’s two slideshow options - Flex Slider and Responsive Slides. You can configure its mute, autoplay, and loop video settings.
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Similarly, you can embed YouTube videos into your slide with its YouTube Slides feature and configure its key settings - Show related videos, Enable controls, Lazy load video, Mute video on start, and Autoplay video. This is also compatible with MetaSlider’s two slideshow options - Flex Slider and Responsive Slides.
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Its Local Video Slides feature lets you create slideshows with videos in your WordPress media library. It displays your MP4, WebM, and MOV videos with a cover image, autoplay, mute, lazy load, the ability to hide controls, and much more.
Pricing
It has a free version available for download on the WordPress Plugin Repository. But if you want to access its Vimeo Slides, YouTube Slides, and Local Video Slides features, you will have to subscribe to its Pro version, available for $39.50 per year.
4. Embed Plus
Embed Plus YouTube WordPress Plugin With YouTube Gallery, Channel, Playlist, Live Stream
Active Installations - 200,000+
Embed Plus is a powerful YouTube WordPress plugin that simplifies the process of embedding and customizing YouTube videos, playlists, channels, galleries, premieres, live streams, and facades on your website. With a focus on maintaining fast page speeds, this plugin offers a range of features to enhance your YouTube embedding experience.
Enjoy the ability to embed facades, defer JavaScript parsing, and lazy load videos, improving GTmetrix scores. Customize your embeds with various layouts, including grid, slider, and vertical, while adding a lightbox for a cinematic effect.
Features
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Embed and customize YouTube videos, playlists, channels, galleries, premieres, live streams, and facades.
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Fast page speeds with deferred JavaScript parsing and lazy loading.
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Responsive thumbnail galleries with a table of contents.
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Cinematic lightbox display for videos.
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Extensive customization options for embedded YouTube players.
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Smart and interactive live streaming capabilities.
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Wizards and automatic defaults for easy setup and configuration.
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Analytics dashboard for insightful video performance data.
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Deleted video alerts to avoid displaying non-existent videos.
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GDPR and EU Cookie Law-friendly privacy options.
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Video SEO tags for improved search engine visibility.
Pricing
A free version of this plugin is available for download. You can subscribe to its Pro version starting at $49.99 per year, which includes advanced gallery customizations, lazy loading, automatic video SEO markup, deleted video alerts, and much more.
5. Photo Gallery
Photo Gallery by 10Web – Mobile-Friendly Image Gallery
Active Installations - 200,000+
The plugin lets you set up galleries and slideshows of images and videos, with customization settings available. This plugin has 50+ extensions, and one of them is YouTube, to help you easily embed YouTube videos, channels, and playlists on your website.
The Photo Gallery extension lets you create elegant, responsive photo and video galleries. The Slider extension helps you present your visual content in beautiful, responsive, and SEO-friendly slides.
Features
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Create as many galleries and albums as you want and add an unlimited number of photos and videos.
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Display your images and videos in a responsive lightbox with features such as slideshow effects, social sharing, a full-width view option, a filmstrip, commenting, and autoplay.
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Include videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Flickr, or Dailymotion within your galleries. You can also add audio tracks for the image slideshow.
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Choose from four widgets, including the WordPress Standard Tag Cloud, Dynamic Tags Cloud, Slideshow, and Gallery widgets, to display albums in sidebar areas.
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Embed a YouTube video by simply pasting the URL.
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Embed a Channel by providing the Channel ID of your YouTube channel.
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Similarly, you can embed a playlist from the YouTube channel on your website.
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Enable social sharing buttons to allow users to share photos on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
Pricing
A free version is available. But we recommend subscribing to the Basic Bundle plan for $85 per year, which lets you access 15+ plugins and 30+ extensions.
6. Prime Slider
Prime Slider – Addons For Elementor (Revolution of a slider, Hero Slider, Media Slider, Drag Drop Slider, Video Slider, Product Slider, Ecommerce Slider)
Active Installations - 90,000+
The Prime Slider is a plugin that has extensive widgets or slider templates for blog posts, images, and videos. Its slider builder is compatible with the Elementor Page Builder plugin. All the slider templates available are fully customizable, visually appealing, responsive, and SEO-optimized.
These widgets are translation- and RTL-ready to help you reach your target audience in the language they speak.
The only issue with the plugin is that the widgets are differentiated based on their design and not their functionality. So, you have to go through each widget to know which is best suited for your requirements.
Features
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You can choose from 50+ slider widgets, each with a different design.
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You can easily create hero sliders, video sliders, image sliders, blog post sliders, and product image and video sliders.
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A lot of customization options are available for each widget.
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You can add videos and images to the slider and link them to any internal or external URL.
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Some widgets support WooCommerce to help you create product images and video sliders.
Pricing
Some widgets are free to download, while others are available for a price. You can also opt for their paid plans, starting at $14.99 per year, which give you access to a set number of slider widgets. If you want the white label option, you’ll have to subscribe to its Agency plan for $104.99 per year. If your requirement is just to embed videos, we recommend going with other cost-effective plugins.
7. The Ultimate Video Player For WordPress – by Presto Player
Active Installations - 80,000+
The Ultimate Video Player For WordPress plugin has everything you need to enhance videos and make them presentable to viewers. This plugin is best for online course creators, bloggers, marketers, and e-commerce stores. It has deep integrations with Gutenberg and other page builders to make it easy to add videos to your store.
Features
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Built specifically for the Block Editor and works with all page builders.
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Supports HTML5, YouTube, and Vimeo videos.
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Multiple video presets for easy customization.
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Multilingual captions for global audience reach.
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Customizable player branding and poster images.
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Lazy loading for improved performance.
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HLS Adaptive Streaming for optimized video delivery.
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Video analytics and Google Analytics integration for comprehensive insights.
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Muted autoplay preview option.
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Video chapters for easy navigation.
Pricing
The WordPress plugin store has a free version available for download. If you want to access its premium features, you have to pay $69 per year. You can also pay a lifetime fee of $399 for 25 websites with access to all features.
Can a mobile app provide an advantage over a website when it comes to videos?
Given that most people are glued to their mobile devices, does having an app for your store have any advantage, particularly for videos and their slideshows? Let’s compare and see.
As you can see from the comparison table, having a mobile app for your store is beneficial to improving user engagement and boosting conversions, not only for videos but overall.
Creating a mobile app for your store is not as challenging as everyone might think. With the advent of no-code app builders like Swipecart, you can build an app for your store without any coding skills. The no-code app-building platforms use a visual interface, a drag-and-drop editor, and pre-coded widgets to help non-technical people create apps in minutes with ease. From embedding videos to slideshows, everything is possible with a few clicks without having to insert any codes. So, leverage the power of the no-code app builder Swipecart to build an app for your WordPress e-commerce store today.
Wrapping Up
The 7 best WordPress Video Plugins we have mentioned here have the highest active installations. You can select one based on your business needs. And don’t forget to try the no-code app builder Swipecart to build an app for your store. An app can be a valuable addition to your marketing strategy and will help you increase shopper engagement and convert them into loyal customers.
