The YouTube Embed Plus plugin allows you to embed YouTube videos, playlists and channels anywhere on your WordPress website.
The plugin can be installed from the WordPress Dashboard. Search for YouTube Embed Plus.
When the plugin is active, you will see a new section in the menu called YouTube Free.
On that page you can change some settings as well as add your YouTube API key.
The plugin developers provide detailed instructions on how to create your free YouTube API key. Follow the documentation and you will have it ready in no time.
While on the Settings page, I recommend that you look at all the options that are available.
In the Performance tab you can enable the Facade Mode, but maybe avoid the autoplay option.
In the Security & Privacy tab you can restrict the Wizard button to specific user roles.
Another important feature is the ability to ask for user consent before loading any YouTube videos. In the words of the developers, this feature might have some issues with certain caching plugins.
For now I will turn off this feature.
Save your changes.
Let’s create a new page.
In the Block Editor, search for the YouTube Wizard block and then Open it.
Let’s Embed a Channel. Add the YouTube link to any of the videos on a channel and the plugin will do the rest.
Even if you see the “This video is unavailable” message, you should be able to click on the buttons above it.
I will insert it as a Gallery. To make it look a little better, in my theme settings I will disable the sidebar for this particular page and then Publish it.
Once published, you can see the gallery with all my videos, with easy pagination. You can customize the appearance of this gallery using some custom CSS code.
Let’s create another page and embed a Playlist instead. Add the YouTube Wizard block, click on Embed a Playlist and paste the link to your playlist.
I will embed it again as a Gallery. Now I can display a separate gallery with my videos on the topic of WordPress Search Engine Optimization.
I don’t know if this is a bug in the current version of the plugin, but it appears that some settings might not work as intended.
For example in the Defaults tab, I turned off Responsive Video Sizing and Autofit Widget videos. Even so, the plugin will load the FitVids script on all my pages.
And even if I have Restricted API loading, the plugin loads its assets on all pages of my website, not only on pages with some YouTube content.
I hope that future versions of this plugin will fix this issue and will load these extra files only when needed.
1 Comment
Hi,
I’m the lead developer of the plugin. Thanks for taking the time
to write this.
Regarding Fitvids: Thanks, that’s a good catch. We’ll have that in our next version.
Restricted API loading: This option refers to the external YouTube API, which is a script whose src=”https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api”. The sources in your screenshot just refer to the assets within our own plugin, which are actually needed on all pages in order to logically scan and detect for YouTube videos in the page, in a performant way. The only alternative way to exclude these scripts in the way described in the article, is to scan for YouTube embeds on the server–which is both unreliable and causes server-side performance problems (i.e. imagine using php on the server to try scan every rendered html artifact before it even gets to your browser. This would add significantly high page load times, whereas we opted instead to include performant deferred client-side javascript to do the same thing).
Cheers and thanks!