Media within WordPress

Media comes in many shapes and sizes these days, from videos you want to add to your WordPress website to images and audio. In this blog post, we'll show you how to do this and get the most out of it.

A WordPress website can look boring without media. A wall of text can act as a deterrent to a large number of visitors and cause people to leave your website. With relevant images, videos and audio you can ensure that your website is interactive. You can do this in a number of different ways.

Adding videos within WordPress

Adding videos within WordPress is a great way to further compliment an article you've written with a video. Visitors who prefer to see a video instead of reading an article can then find the information they are looking for on your website just as well. Videos can be created in a lot of different ways, from shooting a quick video with your phone to a high budget video. The next two ways you can then display them on your WordPress website.

Self hosted within WordPress

Within WordPress and hosting, you can of course upload videos that are then accessible on your website. However, this has a number of disadvantages that you may have overlooked. Namely, that videos take up by far more space on your hosting. A hosting package of MijnHostingPartner.nl has a lot of space put away for you.

However, it is so full when you have uploaded a lot of videos to your hosting. The media is backed up and it takes a lot of bandwidth to load. This can be a good option when you have a single video on your website. However, if you plan to make more you better publish it in one of the following ways.

YouTube or Vimeo

YouTube needs no introduction, with the giant Video hosting site you can find decades of footage. What started with small short videos of 10 minutes has now grown to videos of hours long. Everything can be found there. Also your videos that you want to show on your WordPress website. YouTube has the big advantage that it can build a community outside your website which in turn attracts visitors. And that videos do not count in the used hosting space.

Many websites and bloggers who use YouTube as a platform to attract visitors to a website are very successful. So think of it as one more channel through which you can attract visitors to your website and also rank with your videos for terms in the organic search results.

Vimeo is another option you can use for displaying videos on your WordPress website. However, this does not have nearly the same reach as YouTube can have. This makes it a good platform for uploading promotional videos, for example, that you do not want in the range of YouTube or on a Google service.

Images within WordPress

Images are the most used form of Media within WordPress, from stock images that you can add to make a nice cover for your blog post. To product photos or images from your latest trip. Images for the web do need to be optimized. A mobile user also needs to be able to load a website quickly on a less than optimal network. So make sure your images are below or near 100 KB to be able to load quickly on mobile networks.

You can achieve this by adjusting the height and width, and by running it through image optimization tools like TinyPNG. We have explained this in detail in previous blog posts so we will leave it at that. Read more about image optimization here.

Adding audio and podcasts within WordPress

Audio and especially podcasts are a newer media that are also widely used on WordPress websites. Besides the preference people may have for watching a video instead of reading it, it can also be the case that users prefer to listen to it. Think of the incredibly rapid increase in sales of audiobooks and the wildly popular podcasts by Joe Rogan, for example.

Previously written articles can easily be converted to a short (or long) podcast episode that appears at the top of the article.

Self-hosting of Audio within WordPress

WordPress not only has Video and Images, but also the option to host Audio itself on the website. This will then look like this on the website itself:

This is a convenient way to quickly upload Audio to your WordPress website. But not the most elegant or user-friendly. There are a number of different plugins available to display audio in a nicer way on your WordPress website. Or you can embed it using one of the following ways.

Embedding podcasts via Sound Cloud or other media.

Podcasts can be uploaded to a lot of other platforms to be displayed on your website. Well known platforms for this are Google Podcasts, Soundcloud and Spotify. After this you can embed the podcast in your website. You can also upload the podcast to your own webhosting and then publish it via Google Podcasts. You can read more information about this on the Google manuals themselves.

This embed action gives you besides just the audio bar also a nice picture of the podcast and a handy interface for listening to a podcast. Something that of course only works to your advantage when you're trying to retain listeners.

And that were all the tips MijnHostingPartner.nl has picked for you when hosting Audio, Video and Images on your website. If you have any further questions you can always check out our knowledge base. Here we have many articles dedicated to working and managing media in your hosting.