Searching for the best WordPress YouTube plugins to embed videos, feeds, or galleries on your site?
While WordPress makes it easy to embed individual videos in your content, it doesn’t offer built-in support for more complex embeds such as video galleries, feeds, lightbox popups, etc.
With YouTube plugins, you can fix all of those shortcomings and create more complex types of embeds.
In this post, I will share the eight best WordPress YouTube plugins to help you get more control over adding YouTube content and also improve the performance of your videos.
But First – Do You Need a WordPress YouTube Plugin?
Before I get to the plugins, I want to remind you that you don’t need a YouTube plugin just to embed individual videos in your content. WordPress comes with built-in support for YouTube embeds – all you need to do is add the URL.
If you’re using the WordPress block editor, you can use a YouTube block and paste in the URL to the video:
And if you’re still using the Classic TinyMCE editor, all you need to do is paste the URL into the Visual tab of the editor and WordPress will automatically generate the embed for you.
8 Best WordPress YouTube Plugins
Now, let’s get into the best plugins…
1. Embed Plus for YouTube
Embed Plus for YouTube is the most popular YouTube plugin at WordPress.org, where it’s active on over 200,000 sites.
It lets you embed pretty much any type of YouTube content in your WordPress site including:
- Individual videos
- Playlists
- Galleries
- Channels
- Live streams
No matter what type of video(s) you’re embedding, you’ll get tons of options to control behavior. For example, you can control autoplay, sound, and lots more.
It also includes some really unique features to save time. For example, you can enter the URL of any channel and the plugin will automatically search for an active live stream and display that link. This would let you create one page on your site for live streams and always include the most recent live stream.
Overall, it just generally has a lot of features, which makes it a good option if you need flexibility.
There’s also a premium version that adds even more features including:
- More layouts
- Caching to improve performance
- Lazy loading
- YouTube live chat
- Automatic tagging for video SEO
- Option to receive a notification if one of your embedded videos gets deleted
The premium version starts at $39.
2. Elfsight WordPress YouTube Gallery
This article was written by Harsh Agrawal and originally published on ShoutMeLoud.