How to Embed a YouTube Video on Your Solodev Website in Seconds

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But what about moving pictures?

When it comes to telling your digital story, there's no denying it: video speaks volumes. Not only do our brains process video 60,000 times faster than text (wow!), but it's incredibly engaging. That's important in a world where noisy media and short attention spans make it harder and harder to stand out.

Video is what we call "sticky" content. It attracts eyeballs, and it's super sharable. Good videos can help communicate big ideas quickly and enable you to showcase your products, services, and brand in minutes.

When it comes to performance, adding video to your website is like adding special effects to a movie. It can increase a visitor's time on your page, reduce your bounce rate, improve your SEO, and enhance your conversions by over 80%.

In this post, we'll show you how easy it is to add some video magic of your own to your Solodev website using just a YouTube video ID and a simple shortcode. So grab a seat, butter some popcorn, and get ready for some action.

Why is YouTube the best channel for video?

Hopefully, we've made the case for adding video to your website – and how it can turn your digital content into a summer blockbuster.

But why choose YouTube? Aren't there other hosting platforms out there like Vimeo and Wistia?

There are – and those paid platforms are great, depending on your marketing goals. But for most websites, YouTube is literally a no-brainer. Not only is it free (with an option for a Premium upgrade), it's easy to use and requires almost no training. Most importantly, it can juice your visibility by driving more traffic to your content on the YouTube platform itself.

YouTube instantly compresses video for optimal delivery, so it takes care of the grunt work. It also removes the burden of hosting large video files from your site and CMS, which can slow everything down. Of course, if you're hosting large volumes of video, you might want to consider a platform like Wowza that provides highly scalable enterprise performance.

YouTube also provides Channel Analytics, so you can see what kind of engagement your videos are getting. And because it's part of the Google ecosystem, Google will automatically index your videos and you can easily connect the dots on performance across your website's Google Analytics.

As a rule of thumb, it's always best to embed a YouTube video as opposed to just posting a link. An embedded video will automatically surface the YouTube player right on your web page – so your audience can watch without ever leaving your site.

How to embed a YouTube video on your Solodev website

We said it was easy – and we meant it! Just follow these steps and you'll be ready for prime time.

First, find the video on www.youtube.com that you want to embed on your Solodev site (if it's not already uploaded, you can follow these simple steps).

Next, locate the Share button just below the video player:

Click on the Share button and you'll see a modal window with different options, including a link with a blue Copy button to the right.

Here's the important part: you don't want to copy the entire link – just the YouTube ID. So take your cursor and select only the letters and numbers after the "https://youtu.be/" as shown below. In the example, you would just copy the "Sv3eXRN7hLo" combination.

Once you've saved the ID where you can access it, you're ready to add a smidge of simple code to your site.

Browse to your manager or your page's HTML and add this input field code:

<div class="form-group"> <label class="control-label" for="youtube_id">YouTube Video ID</label> <p>Only copy the ID of the video to embed.</p> <input type="text" class="form-control" name="youtube_id" id="youtube_id"> </div>

After adding this code to your manager, you will see the input field on your manager entry where you will paste the YouTube ID:

Then, on the detail page where the code is going to be rendered, paste the following Solodev shortcode:

[is_set value="{{youtube_id}}"] [youtube id="{{youtube_id}}"] [/is_set]

That's a wrap!

Video is an awesome tool for improving your website's performance. In just a few minutes, you can start adding case studies, promotional segments, video blogs, and more to your digital experience and drive more conversions.

Have questions? Need more guidance? Looking for a director to get things done? We can help! Talk to us today.