9 WordPress Plugins That Can Help Promote Video Content

Get this: 89% of people say watching a video has persuaded them to buy a product or service, and 91% of people say they want to see more videos from brands, according to recent survey data from Wyzowl.

For businesses harnessing the power of WordPress as their website’s CMS, these statistics underscore a valuable opportunity. WordPress, renowned for its flexibility and user-friendly interface, stands out in the CMS arena. Its plugin architecture, in particular, sets it apart.

Unlike other CMS platforms like Drupal, WordPress offers an extensive range of plugins designed to optimize, promote, and enhance video content, making it an ideal choice for content-driven brands. This superiority is nudging more and more brands to migrate from other CMSs like Drupal to WordPress, seeking to leverage its robust features and the ever-growing array of plugins.

In this article, we’ll share with you a handpicked list of WordPress plugins that help in promoting video content.

1. Cincopa

The Cincopa WordPress plugin is an all-in-one media solution designed to enhance WordPress websites with various media types, including videos, photo galleries, slideshows, and audio playlists.

Key Benefits:

• Simplifies media integration on WordPress, supporting videos, slideshows, image galleries, and more.
• Responsive design and HTML5 support ensure compatibility with mobile devices and desktops.
• Features JSON-LD support to boost your content’s ranking in Google SERP.
• Offers comprehensive technical support, tutorials, and video guides.
• Includes over 100 templates, customization options, simple media management, and complete analytics.
• Utilizes Amazon S3 Web Services for reliable media hosting and delivery.

2. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights provides sophisticated tracking features for embedded YouTube, Vimeo, or HTML5 videos on WordPress sites.

Key Benefits:

• Integrates with Google Analytics for direct insights from the WordPress dashboard.
• Tracks video views, plays, and watch progress, essential for understanding audience engagement.
• Enables tracking and analysis of user behavior on your website, offering valuable insights into how visitors interact with your content.
• Places key metrics like bounce rate and top-performing content upfront, making it easy to access without sifting through complex data.

3. Smash Balloon’s YouTube Feed Pro

Ideal for embedding YouTube videos, Smash Balloon’s YouTube Feed Pro offers various responsive layouts and customization options.

Key Benefits:

• Automatically displays new YouTube content on your site, saving time and improving efficiency.
• Supports integration with Smash Balloon’s Social Wall for comprehensive social media platform coverage.
• Displays video reviews from real users, providing authentic feedback that can help increase conversions​.
• Provides options for custom actions when videos are paused or end, like linking to a product page.
• Enables content curation from your YouTube Favorites list and filtering options using keywords in video descriptions or titles.
• Offers pre-built layout options like Grid, Gallery, List, or Carousel for content display.
• Fully localized and translatable, allowing text changes in feeds to display in any language​.

4. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery excels in creating beautiful image and video galleries, supporting various sources including YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia.

Key Benefits:

• User-friendly with a drag-and-drop builder.
• Offers responsive templates and social media integration, enhancing user experience and sharing capabilities.
• The Videos Addon supports a wide range of video services, including self-hosted videos (mp4), YouTube (including playlists and specific start times), Vimeo, Twitch, VideoPress, and DailyMotion videos.
• You can set up video options and edit video metadata, such as enabling a 16:9 video format or displaying videos directly in the gallery view.
• Envira Gallery automatically resizes images to maintain aspect ratio and offers options for cropping images to specific dimensions. This ensures consistency in the presentation of visual content within galleries.
• With its Social addon, Envira Gallery facilitates easy sharing of images and videos on social media platforms, aiding in wider content distribution and potential audience growth.
• Videos can be shown in a lightbox popup, providing an immersive experience for viewers. This feature is especially useful for detailed or high-resolution videos. Customization options like adding arrows, captions, and looping images enhance this experience.
• The plugin allows changing the poster image of videos, providing control over how videos are presented in the gallery.

5. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

AIOSEO helps in optimizing video content for search engines, a crucial aspect of your overall marketing strategy.

Key Benefits:

• Generates a video SEO sitemap. This enables search engines to display these posts in video search results, complete with video thumbnails, thus enhancing the discoverability of video content.
• Its Link Assistant feature is instrumental in managing internal URLs. These internal links to your video content are essential for helping search engines like Google to crawl the site and discover your videos to index and rank, thereby improving SEO performance.
• Provides rich snippets schema and local SEO features, increasing visibility in search results.
• For businesses running online stores, AIOSEO offers specialized features to optimize WooCommerce SEO. This is vital for online stores that rely on video content to showcase products or services​.

6. Presto Player

Presto Player is a versatile plugin supporting videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5 sources, integrated with popular page builders. It not only handles video but also audio content, like podcasts. It enhances viewer experience and provides optimization tools for website owners.

Key Benefits:

• Offers various enhancement settings like muted autoplay preview, inline play options, and customizable poster images, catering to different user preferences and enhancing viewer engagement.
• Provides clickable links for easy navigation to specific points in the video or audio, enhancing user experience and adding an SEO benefit by allowing timestamp titles to be keyword-optimized.
• Provides insightful analytics on how viewers interact with videos, helping you understand audience engagement and retention throughout individual videos​​.
• Supports content restriction features, making videos private and accessible only to logged-in users, a crucial feature for membership sites and online courses​​.
• Allows adding text overlays on videos, which can be turned into clickable links. This feature serves as a call to action, potentially increasing engagement and conversions.
• Enables extensive branding and design customization, including color theme changes, logo additions, and custom presets for video player controls and behaviors
• Integrates with a range of tools, including Bunny.net for video hosting, various LMS platforms like LifterLMS and LearnDash, site builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder, and email marketing services like MailChimp and ActiveCampaign​.

7. WP Video Lightbox

WP Video Lightbox uses a lightbox design for video playback, offering a sleek and integrated user experience.

Key Benefits:

• Presents videos in a lightbox overlay, which darkens the rest of the page and focuses the viewer’s attention solely on the video. This distraction-free environment is conducive to better viewer engagement​
• In addition to videos, WP Video Lightbox can display a variety of media types such as flash, images, and iFrames, making it a versatile tool for different content formats​.
• Provides specific shortcodes for embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos, allowing easy integration of these popular video platforms into WordPress sites.
• The plugin offers several customization options through the prettyPhoto library, including themes for the lightbox, autoplay settings, and modal controls for how the lightbox can be closed by the viewer.
• Automatically retrieve and embed video thumbnails into the lightbox, enhancing the visual appeal and providing context before the video is played​.
• Offers the ability to disable the display of suggested videos at the end of YouTube videos, keeping the viewer focused on the content provided by the site rather than being led away to other YouTube content.
• Provides options for custom URL parameters, video alignment, optional maximal width, and automatic or custom aspect ratios. These features allow for greater control over how videos are displayed and interacted with on your site

8. Advanced Responsive Video Embedder (ARVE)

ARVE is a versatile video embedder compatible with both Gutenberg and Classic editors, supporting major video hosting platforms.

Key Benefits:

• Offers a customizable lightbox and automatic video play options.
• Adds an “Embed Video” button in the Classic Editor and works with various Gutenberg blocks, including Embed, YouTube, Vimeo, and Shortcode blocks.
• Automatically makes videos responsive, which is especially beneficial for mobile users. It uses CSS for responsive embeds, which is more efficient than JavaScript-based solutions.
• Supports almost every video host that offers iframe embed codes. This wide range of support ensures compatibility with popular video platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and many others​.
• ARVE tries to minimize distractions by setting ‘hide brand’ variables where supported and disabling related videos at the end of the playback. This helps in keeping the viewers on your site rather than directing them to other channels or websites.
• Allows you to specify titles, descriptions, and upload dates for your videos, providing search engines with schema.org data they prefer for better indexing.
• Offers WYSIWYG support and a new improved dialog for embedding videos, simplifying the video embedding process and making it more intuitive for users.

9. Video.js HTML5 Player

Video.js HTML5 Player is a responsive, lightweight plugin that supports all popular video formats and offers extensive customization.

Key Benefits:

• Allows autoplay on page load.
• Allows embedding MP4 video files anywhere on your WordPress site, including posts and pages.
• Offers various shortcode options including WebM, Ogv, width, preload, controls, autoplay, poster, loop, and muted, for extensive control over video presentation and behavior​.
• Supports m3u8 file format for HTTP streaming, allowing the use of HLS, DASH, and other HTTP streaming protocols​.

Wrapping up

So there you have it — these plugins are crafted to ensure that your videos are not just seen but also deliver the impact and reach they deserve.

Whether you’re looking to create stunning video galleries, ensure your videos are SEO-friendly, or provide a seamless and interactive video experience, these plugins have you covered. They cater to various needs and preferences, making it easier for you to drive more eyeballs to your video content.