Hosting videos on WordPress – pros and cons

September 13. 2019

Have you been thinking about adding beautiful and captivating videos on your WordPress website? Depending on circumstances, this could be a great business move or it could be an act that will deter visitors away from your website. Just because hosting videos on WordPress is a viable option these days doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its fair share of negative sides. But when you look at it from a different perspective, adding videos to your WordPress website could give it a new look – a look that your visitors will love. However, before making the final decision, take a look at the biggest advantages and disadvantages of adding videos on your website.

You have two options for adding videos on WordPress – embedding vs. self-hosted

Embedding a video is a process that happens in two steps. First, you upload a video to a third-party video hosting service, such as YouTube or Vimeo. Next, you find the SHARE option and click EMBED. Once you do that, you’ll see that you can manually adjust many options to your liking when embedding a video. You can make an embedded video play automatically, you can add captions, turn on or off the privacy-enhanced mode, as well as decide whether you want the embedded video to start playing at a certain time. We know – too many options to choose from!

Once you finish with the embedding options, you should copy the video’s URL and post it into a place you choose in your post or page. The video is on your website but is streamed from the video host’s servers. Besides, YouTube and Vimeo are the two most popular video hosting platforms in the world, used by millions of people. That means there is a greater chance people will find your video when searching for a topic, meaning they will also find your website. And they had no idea it existed.

Self-hosting, on the other hand, means that you upload a video to the server where your website is hosted. The process is the same as uploading an image into your pages and posts with one VERY important difference – video files can be much larger in size! And that brings us to the first con of hosting videos on WordPress websites.

The cons of hosting videos on WordPress

Let’s deal with the negative aspects of hosting videos on your WordPress website so that we could end on a good note. Don’t be scared by the disadvantages of video hosting – there are just as many positive sides to it.

Large video files can bring your website to its knees

A video file can weigh-in more than a whopping 100MB, which is quite a staggering number. With too many requests for a single large file on a server that is shared will quickly exceed the limit of the server where your website is hosted. In case this happens, not only will your videos stop working properly, but they can stop working altogether. We don’t know about you, but we here at WP Full Care wouldn’t like to see the comments of your website visitors that would pour in, nor would we like something like that to be associated with our business.

Hosting videos can take up a lot of  your time

You can’t just upload a video and be done with it. Well, you can, but that could be very detrimental to your website. In reality, before adding videos, you would first have to test and measure video performance. Are the videos played on different formats when played on different platforms? Will adding a video improve user experience? Are the videos playing in high-quality or do they need any improvement? If you are thinking about hosting videos on WordPress, this should be a mandatory part of your website maintenance and monitoring.

Your videos could be further distributed

Unless you take the necessary measures of precaution, you run a high risk of some nefarious individual downloading your video and redistributing it on different file sharing sites. To prevent an event like this, you can use different WordPress plugins which can help you protect your content from thieves. On the other hand, when embedding a video on Vimeo PRO, you can hide your video from the public and then specify a domain where you can embed your video. That will fix the security issue right away.

The pros of hosting videos on WordPress

Have all the negative sides got you down? Lighten up! People wouldn’t be adding videos on their WordPress website had this prospect not come with a lot of benefits. We are about to reveal some of them!

If done right, videos can be a beautiful thing for your website

Videos would certainly add a unique flair to your website. Whether you use them for your posts or pages, you are certainly bound to captivate your audience. But only if done right! A high-quality video will be very useful, informative, and overall a great addition to any type of content. You’ll be seeing positive comments on your posts, which will give you the motivation to keep up the good work. It might even help you become more engaged with your audience, which is always a great thing.

Videos can engage your visitors

In the 21st Century, where our attention spans are getting shorter, people have to work extra hard if they want to engage their audience. Since not a lot of people are inclined to read paragraphs of text (hey, some people want to relax after a hard day at work,) they might be willing to get the same information through a different medium. And that’s where videos enter the scene. In fact, they can be a great tool for much more than just engaging your visitors. Now that you have their attention, you have the opportunity to do something with it.

They can be of great help when selling your products and services

What is the goal of having a website if not to sell your products and/or services? In your attempt to have a successful business, you will use different tools to help you out. Like adding live chat to your WordPress website for constant customer support, and hosting videos on WordPress. A video that contains helpful information about your products and services could help you sell them in a unique manner. After all, sometimes, people are more inclined to believe what they see as opposed to what they read. So just make sure you upload engaging, informative, and high-quality videos and you should have no problems.