About a year ago, WordPress added a feature that made it ridiculously easy to embed content from various sites (like YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo) into WordPress sites.
How to embed media in WordPress in a second
If you want to embed, for example, a YouTube video in a post, all you do is paste the URL of the video into the editor, unlink it and save/publish. See our ultimate guide to embedding HTML and iframes in WordPress on WPGarage for more info on how this works.
The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work 100% of the time. Luckily, there’s usually a reason for this. So if you’re having trouble embedding media in your WordPress site, see if the following tips help you out.
1. Your WordPress site isn’t set to enable embeds of this kind.
Whenever you set up a WordPress site, you have the option to allow embeds or not. Make sure you’ve chosen this option.
- Go to Settings > Media.
- Under Embeds check the option: “When possible, embed the media content from a URL directly onto the page. For example: links to Flickr and YouTube.”
- Save changes.
2. You aren’t using the right link
It’s possible you aren’t using the right link. For example, maybe you copied the link of a channel instead of an individual video.
Here is an example of a URL that won’t work:
http://www.youtube.com/illuminea#p/u/1/LlSeZIHroNw
Instead, the URL should look something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlSeZIHroNw
Lets see it work (all I did was un-hyperlink the above link to get the embedded video below):
Man, it’s so easy I could spit!
3. Extra code is messing things up
Maybe extra code is being added to the WordPress editor without you realizing. Try embedding the link into the HTML editor instead of the Visual one. If you see any extra code aside from the link itself, remove it.
4. The YouTube user isn’t allowing embeddings of their media
When someone uploads a video to YouTube, they can choose whether or not others will be able to embed their video around the web. If they chose not to allow it, no matter what you do, you won’t be able to embed it into your site.
Want to know how to change the embedding settings on one of your YouTube videos? Here’s how:
- Make sure you’re logged into YouTube (with your Google account).
- Click on the arrow next to your username in the top right-hand corner.
- Click on My Videos.
- Click Edit info on the video you want to edit.
- Scroll down to Embedding and click the arrow next to it in order to see the two options.
- Choose whether or not external sites will be able to embed your video.
- Click Save Changes.
Anything else?
These are the problems we’ve found that prevent the awesome WordPress embed function from working. Have you found any other issues that don’t allow you to embed using links in WordPress?