Great WordPress Plugins: Videos

Videos bring a website to life. They’re way more engaging than still images, and like webpage sliders, videos can help you share information. For example, visitors to your website may be looking for a product review or a how-to tutorial. Or perhaps potential clients or employers are examining your work. Regardless, video is a powerful, persuasive medium for any audience.

Thankfully, various WordPress plugins make it easy to insert video right into your website.

Like photo galleries, video plugins for WordPress work best when leveraging a free video service, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion. These services are designed to optimize videos for use online, making the ideal video experience for your website visitors. Once your videos are uploaded to one of these services, you can then use a video plugin with WordPress to leverage your videos into your site with just a few clicks.

Of the countless plugins available, we identified three that are easy-to-use and offer unique features to help you get the most out of sharing videos on your WordPress site.

Artiss YouTube Embed

This is a powerful, simple method of embedding YouTube videos into your WordPress site.  Artiss has several customization capabilities including: sizing, playlists, multiple profile integration, transitions, and much more. It is also adds Google compatible metadata to the video output, making it ideal for SEO.

Vimeo SimpleGallery

This Vimeo plugin is great for sharing a gallery (or playlist) of videos. Create thumbnails for videos in your playlist and even set a Shadowbox or Thickbox in which to play your videos on your page. The plugin also fetches titles from your Vimeo automatically, as well as height and width. Despite all these features, we found it simple to use and easy to install.

Easy FancyBox

A simple and flexible media lightbox solution for your website. In addition to YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion support, Easy FancyBox also supports images, WordPress galleries, PDF, and SWF (flash files). This plugin is great way to incorporate videos in a beautiful overlay on your site, and Easy FancyBox is multi-site compatible and supports iFrame and Flash movies.

Let us know how these plugins worked for you. Or if you have a different plugin that you prefer, share it in the comments below! Remember, if the plugins mentioned here don’t fit your needs, you can always search for alternatives.