Videos bring your WordPress website to life. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is the golden age of online videos. With the ability to attract, engage, and build loyalty in visitors, videos play a vital role in every business marketing strategy now and then.
You can quickly show your product capability via marketing videos or use tutorials to explain how to get started with the products. Videos also serve as efficient training materials without forcing learners to spend hours reading thousands of words.
In fact, displaying videos on your WordPress site would turn out to be an intimidating step. Is video just another type of media file that you can upload in the same way as what you’re doing with images? Yes, but No! There are many other things to consider before deciding to host videos on your site server.
Need more proof? Let’s break down why you shouldn’t upload videos directly to your WordPress media library. We’ll then provide 3 alternative solutions for better video management.
- Can WordPress host videos?
- 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Choose WordPress For Your Video Hosting
- Consideration Before Picking a Video Hosting Platform
- Top 3 Video Hosting Services
Can WordPress host videos?
Yes, you can surely host a video on your WordPress. But do you know that you’re also able to host them on a third-party platform like Youtube? One out of these 2 different paths of displaying videos would be over the other, depending on your purposes.
WordPress self-hosted videos
Self-hosting means that your videos are saved in the same web server as your WordPress site. With a few clicks or drag and drop actions, you can add a video from your computer to your media library and place it on any page or post. There is no complex technical knowledge required here.
This method allows you to own your video data. Nobody has the right to ban or report your hard-to-make recordings. You’ll have full control over how the video format looks. Unfortunately, that’s all about the advantages of self-hosted videos. And they’re definitely not enough to outweigh its own cons as well as embedded video’s pros.
WordPress embedded videos
As the name suggests, embedded videos enable you to upload them to a third-party hosting service such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Facebook. After that, you copy links from these platforms and paste them into your WordPress content. This results in running the external servers once your video is streamed, instead of your WordPress hosting one.
The video quality will depend on the viewers’ browser and their internet connection, not your site condition. It helps ensure smooth playback and provides an enjoyable viewing experience for the audience.
5 reasons you shouldn’t host your own WordPress video
In fact, just because you’re permitted to upload a video to your WordPress site, nothing could be further from the truth that you shouldn’t do so.
#1 Require more server space
While an image takes only 1Mb to 10Mb on average, videos tend to be much larger. It would range from 200MB to over 5GB for a 720 video lasting from 1 to 60-minute. If many people watch your video at the same time, you might end up with a lack of bandwidth. Hence, you have to upgrade your hosting service to premium plans for faster video loading.
That’s why embedded videos come in useful in this case. Every time someone plays a video, it uses up bandwidth from that external server and won’t eat into your storage space, which doesn’t cost you anything.
# 2 Slow down your WordPress site
Have you ever asked yourself why your site is suddenly so slow? It must carry at least 10 plugins for advanced configuration, in addition to thousands of images for better site design and appearance. Such things already reduce your page loading time.
Adding several long videos might make the matters worse. It takes visitors forever to load your site. Consequently, they give up staying on your site and won’t come back.
With an external video hosting service, you never have to encounter these issues. YouTube is able to handle millions of users streaming a video at once because of complex servers, for example. Making sure your WordPress website always stays speedy will no longer become a difficult task.
#3 Limit the file sizes and take time to upload
WordPress authorizes a maximum of 25MB for each file in most cases. In fact, this number may range from 2 to 150MB, depending on the certain web hosting providers and their settings. This means that there is no way for you to manually upload a 15-minute video to your site.
On top of that, it takes time to upload a video. Imagine you have waited for more than 5 minutes to add a video and the result turns into an error message which certainly drives you mad.
This situation would never happen when you’re making use of external WordPress video hostings. The headache will be relieved no matter how big your videos are.
#4 Lose potential traffic from other channels
We all know that it’s difficult to popularize a video if you don’t already have a lot of traffic coming. Having your videos hosted on social channels like Facebook or Vimeo leads users from these platforms to your websites with ease. Their huge built-in audience may feel interested in the video content and will click on the link to visit your site.
At the same time, it’s possible for you to advertise your video to reach out to numerous relevant users. This feature gets the thumbs up from video owners, which self-hosted videos have not provided.
#5 Require tricky code
You need to write a few shortcodes whenever adding a self-hosted video to your WordPress content to determine its format as well as the location on the server.
For instance,
video width="" height="" mp4="movie.mp4" ogv="movie.ogv" webm="movie.webm"
It’s not simpler even if you’re using a plugin.
In case your video has different formats, you have to convert and upload them individually. This verifies the video quality and you won’t know which type works best.
All these outstanding reasons probably prevent you from hosting videos on your WordPress site. It’s time to seek better options.
Things to Consider Before Choosing a Video Host
- Your goals when creating videos
Business owners create and place videos on their site for multiple purposes. You have a brand new website and these marketing videos will build your awareness, you already published a lot of on-site blogs, and these videos can assist in engaging readers. Or it may depend on your business focus like providing video online courses.
The first few marketing videos can be published on Youtube or Vimeo for more user visibility. Online course videos, on the other hand, shouldn’t become available on the Internet. It’s better to upload these videos to Amazon S3 then protect them with supporting tools.
- Platform features
Deciding which features you need doesn’t come as an easy task. You have to list out what you want from a hosting server by answering these questions. Do you live stream or share the content internally? What download options are you looking for?
Pay attention to the video design to make sure that it matches your website, or at least you can customize it.
- Video hosting budget
Each service offers a different pricing package. Some provide services based on the storage you use. Others, meanwhile, are free for a certain number of GB, then you are charged regularly. There is a one-time pricing plan allowing you to pay once and get the service forever with unlimited video storage.
If you rarely create a video, pick a server with a free trial plan first. It reduces the chance of wasting money on unused hosting storage.
3 Best WordPress Video Hosting Services
When thinking of video hosting providers, YouTube would immediately come into your mind due to its popularity and capability. It’s completely cost-free. With a registered account, you’re permitted to upload as many videos as you want in any size. The money will continuously go to your pocket by letting YouTube put ads on your videos.
However, is it a perfect solution? Firstly, ads played on your video might annoy viewers and stop them from keeping watching. In addition, report issues are the concern of most video creators. What if you wake up one day and see your video appear nowhere without any explanation. This just stresses you out. You have nobody to contact or ask for support.
Due to those disadvantages, online business owners seem to avoid this platform and attempt to find a replacement. The 3 following alternative options with their excellent features can blow your mind.
#1 Vimeo
Similar to YouTube, Vimeo enables you to upload videos there and embed them to your WordPress content by pasting a link. It best fits professional bloggers, marketers, and online coaching.
The Free version authorizes 5GB maximum. You must upgrade to paid plans for live streaming or more video uploads which cost from $7 to $75 per month. You can enjoy full support and customization when choosing any of these plans. Password protection, video statistics, caption addition are breezes too.
Critical features
- Offer a free plan and various paid structures
- Integrate seamlessly with social media platforms
- Set up many privacy options to protect your videos
- Allow selling videos with your own price
#2 Wistia
Recognized as a digital marketing solution, Wistia lets you host and display videos on your WordPress website. What more, you can use it to capture leads via forms and CTA. This information will be tracked and inserted to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software such as Hubspot, Google Analytics.
You might find it exciting to have the first 3 hosted for free. The next 7 additional ones will cost you $99/month. It bills you $0.25 monthly for each video from the 11th as well.
Although the platform requires you to upgrade, the unpaid version already comes with tons of useful features. You can create custom thumbnails, send out emails, and protect videos with ease.
Another thoughtful feature is detailed video analytics showing how your visitors interact with your videos so that you can improve them for a better marketing campaign. The software provides full viewer history, trending graphs, which CTA buttons convert the most or even the most clicked related videos.
Critical features
- Enable high bandwidth usage
- Analyze video statistic efficiency via user engagement statistics
- Bill based on storage usage
- Integrate well with popular CRM platforms to manage leads
- Secure videos with passwords and other private settings
#3 Amazon S3
Amazon S3 makes it quite complicated and requires a certain level of technical skills to set up. However, everything becomes a lot simpler after that. Just upload your videos to WordPress’s built-in media library as normal.
Rather than going to your server, they will be offloaded to the Amazon S3 storage server. As a result, once somebody plays the video, it takes this platform’s bandwidth, instead of yours. To do so, you need help from the WP Offload S3 Lite plugin.
Amazon S3 can highly integrate with many other plugins and software for advanced video management and protection. Take Prevent Direct Access Gold and Amazon S3 WordPress Uploads as examples.
Critical features
- Host your own videos without eating your server storage or bandwidth
- Integrate with
- Require a certain level of technical skills to embed videos on your website pages
- If you would like to keep everything under control and be able to fine-tune your video integration settings, your platform of choice is Amazon S3
- Protect your videos: integrate with Prevent Direct Access Gold and Protect WordPress Video extension
Choose What’s Best for Your Website
When hosting your own videos, you lose more than gain. Not only because it takes space and slows down your site but also because of its inconvenience and complexity.
Beside Youtube, the giant video platform, there’re still other options for you including Vimeo, Wistia, and Amazon S3. Each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, but depending on your situation you might need to prioritize one over the others.
Once you determine which hosting is best for you, don’t forget to find a well compatible protection plugin to secure your valuable videos. Prevent Direct Access Gold and its powerful Protect WordPress Video extension are the most brilliant choices for you to make sure none of your uploaded videos can be leaked out to the general public without your permission.
