Introduction
Welcome to our new blog series on Using Videos in WordPress Sites.
This is a short introduction to using videos in WordPress.
While this initial post is quite brief, we will be expanding its content very soon.
We will explore how to insert videos into your site and how to use videos on your site by linking to popular video hosting solutions.
We will also discuss useful video features available from different video software providers.
This will be illustrated with videos from PJD Academy so that you can see an example of how the tool or approach might work for you.
3 Ways to Show Videos with Your WordPress Site
One way to use video in your WordPress site is to upload a video to your Media Library and then to insert the video into a post or a page by using the Video block under the Media category of blocks. This will only work for short videos that are within the video size limit available for your website. The video will play directly on your WordPress site.
A second way to use video in your WordPress site is to insert a link to the video into a post or page. The video will need to be hosted on a video hosting website. The video will play on the video hosting site rather than on WordPress.
A third way to use video in your WordPress site is to embed it into a post or a page by using one of the Embeds blocks. This will only work for the listed Embeds blocks, which include YouTube, Vimeo, VideoPress, and many others. With this approach, the video will play directly on your WordPress site.
ScreenPal
ScreenPal (formerly known as Screencast-O-Matic) has many useful video features such as screen recording, video editing, video hosting, and interactive video.
To see what videos hosted by ScreenPal look like, you can view one of PJD Academy’s videos at this link:
https://pjd-academy.screencasthost.com/watch/c3QOV2VOsbu
Note two useful features included in the ScreenPal video software.
At the end of the sample PJD Academy video is a call-to-action (CTA) button Sign Up, which links to a PJD Academy sign up page.
A secondary URL has also been included, which links to our website on LearnWorlds, one of the course hosting platforms that PJD Academy uses.
ScreenPal allows you to insert the CTA button and secondary URL at any point in the video that you choose, at the beginning, at the end, or anywhere in between by using a timestamp feature.
ScreenPal also has a video quiz feature, which makes your video into an interactive video. This allows you to insert into your video a multiple choice question, a true/false question, a short answer question, a poll, or a rating. Check out an example of a true/false question from PJD Academy at this link:
https://pjd-academy.screencasthost.com/quiz/c0f3Vu7p
You can visit ScreenPal at this link:
YouTube
This is an example of an embedded YouTube video:
This was embedded to play directly on the PJD Academy WordPress site by using the YouTube block listed under the Embeds block menu. You just insert the YouTube video link into the appropriate field inside the YouTube block and wait for WordPress to automatically display the video.
Check back for further updates to this post. In the coming weeks, we will be including more examples of video features available from different software providers and more examples of video hosting platforms.
