10 Best WordPress YouTube Plugins for Speed, Visuals & Growth

Last updated on Sep 28, 2024 by Southie Williamson

When it comes to adding YouTube videos to your WordPress site, you might think it’s as simple as copying and pasting a URL. But if you want to create a polished, well-organized video gallery, embed entire playlists, or optimize video performance, you’ll quickly realize there’s more to it.

With so many WordPress YouTube plugins available, choosing the right one can be overwhelming. Not every plugin will offer the features or functionality you need, and a low-quality YouTube plugin can slow down your site or limit your customization options.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the best YouTube plugins for WordPress, from simple embedding tools to advanced options that help boost engagement and performance. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced user, you’ll find the perfect plugin to suit your needs.

How to Choose the Right YouTube Plugin

Choosing the right YouTube plugin for your WordPress site is crucial to ensure a seamless video integration experience. Several factors should be considered to make an informed decision:

• Ease of Use: Look for plugins with a user-friendly interface and straightforward setup process.
• Customization Options: A good YouTube plugin should provide ample customization options to tweak the appearance and behavior, such as player styles, layouts, and responsive designs.
• Performance: Video embedding can significantly impact website speed and performance. Choose a plugin optimized for performance, with features like lazy loading.
• Compatibility: Ensure the plugin is compatible with your WordPress theme and other plugins, especially if you use page builders like SeedProd, Elementor, or Beaver Builder.

Ready to dive into our list of the best WordPress YouTube plugins? Let’s go!

Top WordPress YouTube Plugins

Hundreds (if not thousands) of WordPress YouTube plugins are available, each offering unique features and capabilities. It’s impossible to review them all, but here’s our list of favorites.

1. Envira Gallery 

Envira Gallery is a powerful and versatile plugin that allows you to create beautiful video galleries, including YouTube videos. With its user-friendly interface, responsive design, playlist embedding capabilities, and extensive customization options, you can seamlessly showcase visually appealing YouTube content anywhere on your website. You can even embed entire YouTube playlists in a gallery.

Envira’s galleries automatically adjust to fit any screen size, ensuring visitors can enjoy your YouTube videos on desktop, tablet, or mobile devices with no compatibility issues.

Simply copy and paste the video URLs, choose a layout template, customize your design, and the plugin will handle the rest. The plugin also offers a lightbox player for an immersive viewing experience and social sharing buttons for visitors to easily share your videos.

Our Favorite Features:

• Fully responsive and mobile-friendly
• Automatically generates thumbnails, which can also be displayed in the lightbox for navigation
• Video galleries can also include photos and media from multiple sources, including (YouTube videos and playlists, Vimeo, Twitch, DailyMotion, Wistia, VideoPress, and self-hosted)
• The lightbox player supports autoplay at a particular minute/sec.
• Excellent performance and speed optimization with built-in lazy loading
• Social sharing buttons in the gallery and/or lightbox view
• Extensive customization options for styling and branding and many addons for advanced gallery functionality

Pricing: The Videos Addon is included in the Pro plan, which starts at $99.50 / year.

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Key Takeaway: Envira Gallery is an excellent choice for WordPress users looking to create professional-grade video galleries with YouTube integration. Its powerful features, ease of use, and customization options make it a top choice.

2. Smash Balloon YouTube Feed Pro

Smash Balloon YouTube Feed Pro is a powerful WordPress plugin that lets you seamlessly embed YouTube feeds directly into your website, including individual videos, playlists, channels, favorite lists, and more.

With its advanced features and customization options, you have complete control over the appearance of your YouTube feeds, allowing you to match the design and branding of your website. From customizing the layout and styling to adjusting the video player settings and adding a subscribe button. You can even combine your YouTube feed with content from other social platforms using Smash Balloon’s suite of social media plugins, creating a truly unique and engaging experience for visitors.

One of the plugin’s standout features is its ability to embed live streams from YouTube. Whether you’re hosting a live event, a product launch, or a Q&A session, Smash Balloon ensures your audience never misses a beat.

When it comes to website performance, speed is a crucial factor. Luckily, SmashBalloon also excels in that department. With its optimized code and caching mechanisms, the plugin ensures that your YouTube feeds load quickly, improving SEO and the overall user experience.

Our Favorite Features:

• Easy to embed YouTube playlists, channels, and more
• Supports YouTube live streams
• Banner with a Subscribe button
• Optimized for speed and performance
• Extensive customization options for branding and design
• Responsive and mobile-friendly
• GDPR compliance features

Pricing: Starts at $49 / year (lite version available). It can also be purchased in the All Access Bundle, which includes all of Smash Balloon’s social feed plugins.

Key Takeaway: Smash Balloon YouTube Feed Pro is a beginner-friendly plugin that’s perfect for WordPress users who want to showcase YouTube feeds and live streams in a professional and engaging layout.

3. RafflePress

RafflePress is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to create engaging social giveaways and contests directly on your website. With its user-friendly interface and extensive customization options, you can design visually appealing campaigns to grow your YouTube channel and increase engagement.

RafflePress offers a collection of pre-designed templates, including designs that are specifically tailored for YouTube giveaways and contests. These templates provide a solid foundation, saving you time and effort in setting up your campaigns. Whether you want to run a simple giveaway or a more complex contest, RafflePress has a template to suit your needs.

In addition to its YouTube-specific features, RafflePress seamlessly integrates with various social media platforms, enabling you to promote your giveaways and contests across multiple channels. This cross-platform integration ensures maximum visibility and reach, helping you attract a wider audience and potential subscribers.

Another notable aspect of RafflePress is its built-in tracking analytics. You can track entries, engagement, and conversion rates, giving you a comprehensive understanding of what resonates with your audience.

Our Favorite Features:

• Dedicated templates for YouTube giveaways and contests
• Easy integration with social media platforms
• Comprehensive tracking and analytics
• User-friendly interface for campaign creation
• Customizable design options

Pricing: Plans start at $39.50 / year (lite version available).

Key Takeaway: RafflePress is a powerful tool for using giveaways and contests on WordPress to grow your YouTube following and engage with your audience.

4. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation and conversion optimization plugin for WordPress. Like RafflePress, it’s not primarily a YouTube plugin. However, it offers several features that make it an excellent choice for promoting your YouTube channel and driving more subscribers.

One of the key features of OptinMonster is its ability to create various conversion campaigns, including popups, slide-ins, and banners. With these campaigns, you can encourage visitors to subscribe to your YouTube channel by offering incentives or simply making it easy for them to subscribe with a click.

OptinMonster also allows you to create lightbox popups that display YouTube trailers and videos from your channel. This feature is particularly useful for showcasing your best content to entice visitors to subscribe to your channel.

We love that you can target specific campaigns based on various factors, such as the visitor’s location, device, browser, and even their behavior on your site. This level of targeting ensures that your campaigns and embedded YouTube videos are shown to the most relevant audience, increasing their effectiveness.

Our Favorite Features:

• Versatile conversion campaigns (popups, slide-ins, banners, spin-to-win, fullscreen, etc.)
• Lightbox popups for embedded YouTube videos
• Advanced display rules for precise audience targeting
• A/B testing and analytics for campaign optimization

Pricing: Plans start at $7 / month.

Key Takeaway: OptinMonster is an excellent tool for leveraging conversion campaigns and lightbox popups on WordPress to promote your YouTube channel and drive more subscribers.

5. Soliloquy

Soliloquy is a popular WordPress slider plugin that allows you to create sliders and carousels with embedded YouTube videos. You can easily customize the layout and video player to match your website’s design, and the plugin offers a lightbox if you prefer a more immersive experience for your YouTube videos.

The plugin is optimized for speed and is fully responsive, ensuring that your video sliders look great on any device. We especially love that it offers seamless integration with the WooCommerce plugin and supports other types of content, such as images and PDFs. This makes it easy to display your product photos, PDFs (like sizing guides or user manuals), and YouTube videos (like product reviews or demos) in one cohesive slider.

Our Favorite Features:

• Seamless YouTube video integration in carousels and sliders
• Responsive design for mobile-friendliness
• Options for thumbnail navigation and lightbox display
• Lightweight and optimized for speed
• WooCommerce integration

Pricing: Support for video content is included in all paid plans, which start at $19.50 / year.  

Key Takeaway: Soliloquy is perfect for WordPress users looking to create stunning, responsive video sliders and carousels that feature YouTube content.

6. WP YouTube Lyte

WP YouTube Lyte is a lightweight plugin designed to improve the performance of your WordPress website by overriding the default embed function in WordPress, which allows you to lazy-load your videos.

Unlike traditional YouTube embeds that can slow down your website, WP YouTube Lyte embeds a preview of the video and only loads the actual video player when the visitor clicks to play it. The result looks the same to visitors but loads much faster since it’s not sending a bunch of requests to the YouTube server.

You’ll need a YouTube API key so the plugin can access video thumbnails, titles, and descriptions. After that, it’s extremely straightforward—just paste a YouTube URL in your editor, and WP YouTube Lyte will handle the rest.

Our Favorite Features:

• Lazy loading for improved performance
• Simple to use, works with WordPress’s default oEmbed function
• Local thumbnail caching options to further improve performance
• Supports playlists and multiple video embedding options

Pricing: Free.

Key Takeaway: WP YouTube Lyte is ideal for WordPress users who prioritize performance and need a simple yet effective way to embed YouTube videos without slowing down their site.

7. Embed Plus for YouTube

As you probably guessed, Embed Plus for YouTube is a YouTube embedding plugin that provides a range of features for displaying videos on your WordPress site. You can embed individual videos as well as YouTube playlists, shorts, and live streams.

It’s not as beginner-friendly as some of the other YouTube plugins on our list, but it has a few unique features that set it apart. For example, ‘Modest Branding’ reduces the YouTube branding shown in your gallery, and ‘Facade Mode’ improves speed by only loading videos when necessary.

The free version is a bit limited in terms of layouts and customization. However, there’s a premium version if you want to go beyond the standard grid style and access more features like a video lightbox, caching, and the YouTube live chat box for live stream embeds.

Our Favorite Features:

• Video, playlist, and live stream embedding
• ‘Facade Mode’ to improve load times
• ‘Modest Branding’ to reduce the amount of YouTube branding on videos
• Autoplay and looping options

Pricing: Free (Pro version starts at $49.99 / year)

Key Takeaway: Embed Plus Plugin for YouTube is a solid choice for users who want to embed YouTube videos and live streams on WordPress while prioritizing load times. It’s especially useful for removing YouTube branding on embedded videos.

8. YourChannel

The YourChannel plugin allows you to embed your entire YouTube channel directly onto your WordPress site. It’s an excellent option for content creators and businesses who want to display all their videos in one place.

Visitors can browse through your videos without ever leaving your site. The plugin lets you specify how many videos to load initially, and you can set a maximum for the number of videos visitors can scroll through. YourChannel also has a built-in caching system for WordPress to help with performance.

The setup is very simple— just enter your channel ID or YouTube username, and the plugin will automatically retrieve your video thumbnails and banner images. It can also display your subscriber count and total number of views.

Our Favorite Features:

• Display your entire YouTube channel on your website
• Customizable display options (e.g., hide/show subscriber counts)
• Built-in caching for improved performance
• Cookies consent notice when visitors click the play button to help with GDPR compliance

Pricing: Free.

Key Takeaway: YourChannel is a free YouTube plugin that provides a quick and easy way to embed your entire YouTube channel on your WordPress site, complete with built-in caching and customization options. It’s ideal for those who want to showcase their complete YouTube presence on their website.

9. YouTube Showcase

With YouTube Showcase, you can create galleries or grids to display YouTube videos in a more organized and visually appealing way. The plugin supports pagination, categories, and tags, making it a convenient option for users who want to manage and showcase extensive collections of videos.

You can add any video from YouTube using the 11-digit alphanumeric key at the end of the video’s URL. Each video you add can be categorized and tagged, which helps with organization and makes it easier for visitors to find the content they’re looking for.

The fully responsive plugin ensures your galleries look great on any device. It offers a standard gallery layout or a 4 column grid and includes two sidebar widgets to display featured or recent YouTube videos. While the customization options aren’t very robust, there is an advanced section for adding custom CSS or custom JavaScript.  

Our Favorite Features:

• Responsive design
• Categories and tags for organization
• Default pagination to improve load times
• Sidebar widgets for featured or recent YouTube videos
• Works with any YouTube video (no Channel ID or API key needed)

Pricing: Free.

Key Takeaway: YouTube Showcase is a no-frills solution for WordPress users looking to display a large collection of YouTube videos in a well-organized gallery or grid format.

10. Advanced WordPress Backgrounds

If you want to create beautiful parallax backgrounds using YouTube videos, Advanced WordPress Backgrounds is worth considering. This unique plugin allows you to turn YouTube videos into dynamic parallax backgrounds, adding an eye-catching and engaging visual element to your WordPress site.

Using the native integration with the Gutenberg block editor or a shortcode, you can easily paste the video URL from YouTube to turn it into a page, post, or section background. The plugin lets you add colored overlays, scroll effects, and custom margins or padding. You can also customize your video background’s start/end time, speed, opacity, and scale, and a handy toggle lets you disable the effect on mobile.

Our Favorite Features:

• Turns YouTube, Vimeo, or self-hosted videos into parallax backgrounds
• Customizable overlay colors
• Adjustable start/end time, scale, speed, opacity, and scroll effects
• Gutenberg integration and option to disable on mobile

Pricing: Free.

Key Takeaway: Advanced WordPress Backgrounds is perfect for WordPress users looking to add dynamic YouTube video backgrounds to their site. It’s a great way to showcase video content while enhancing the visual appeal of your website with a modern, interactive design feature.

FAQs and Common Issues with WP YouTube Plugins

While WordPress YouTube plugins are designed to streamline the process of embedding videos, users may still encounter some common issues. Here are some frequent questions, problems, and solutions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a YouTube plugin for WordPress?

While there isn’t an official YouTube plugin for WordPress, many third-party plugins make it easy to embed YouTube videos, playlists, and even live streams on your site. These plugins offer a variety of features, such as responsive designs, lazy loading for faster performance, and customization options for how videos are displayed. Popular choices include Envira Gallery and Smash Balloon YouTube Feed Pro. Both help you manage and display YouTube content more effectively on your WordPress site.

Do I need a plugin to embed YouTube videos on WordPress?

No, you don’t need a plugin to embed YouTube videos on WordPress, as you can simply paste the video URL into your content, and WordPress will automatically embed the video. However, using a YouTube plugin offers additional benefits, such as customizing the appearance of your video, improving loading times, creating video galleries, and embedding entire playlist feeds. Plugins can also help optimize performance and enhance the user experience, especially if you’re adding multiple videos or want more control over how they appear on your site.

Does embedding YouTube videos slow down your website?

Embedding multiple YouTube videos can slow your site’s loading speed, especially on mobile devices. However, you can mitigate this by using a dedicated WordPress YouTube plugin. Many video plugins, like Envira Gallery, are optimized for speed and offer features like lazy loading to improve performance. If you’re using WordPress’s default block to embed YouTube videos, WP YouTube Lyte is a free plugin that can improve page speed by only loading video thumbnails initially and the actual video content on demand.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Videos Not Displaying Properly

If your YouTube videos are not displaying correctly on your WordPress site, the first step is to check if the plugin is up-to-date and compatible with your WordPress theme and version. You should also ensure you’ve correctly copied and pasted the video URL, channel ID, or YouTube API key into the plugin’s settings. Additionally, clear your browser cache and try a different browser to rule out any caching issues.

Responsive Design Issues

If your embedded YouTube videos aren’t responsive or scaling properly on different devices, check if your plugin offers responsive design options. Many plugins allow you to customize display settings for mobile, set maximum and minimum width and height values, or enable automatic responsive scaling. You can also try adjusting the CSS styles for the video container.

Compatibility Issues with Page Builders

Some page builders may not play nice with certain YouTube plugins, causing layout or display issues. In such cases, you may need to experiment with different plugin settings or try a different plugin designed to work with your page builder.

Privacy and GDPR Compliance

If you’re concerned about privacy and GDPR compliance, look for plugins that offer privacy-enhancing features, such as disabling third-party cookies or loading videos from a privacy-enhanced source. Smash Balloon YouTube Feed Pro is a great choice that provides GDPR compliance features. You could also check out YourChannel, which asks for user consent before playing videos.

Using a WordPress plugin to embed YouTube videos and grow your following can be a powerful way to engage your audience and enhance the user experience. If you still need help with a particular YouTube plugin, we recommend consulting the plugin’s documentation or contacting their support team for more tailored advice.  

As you can see, YouTube plugins come in all shapes and sizes. You can effortlessly create video galleries, embed playlists and channels, optimize video loading times, or even leverage YouTube videos for conversion campaigns and giveaways to increase your subscribers.

Envira Gallery stands out as one of the best YouTube plugins for WordPress. With its drag-and-drop interface, powerful features, and extensive customization options, Envira Gallery empowers you to create stunning video galleries, embed playlists, and leverage YouTube videos to increase engagement.

Not using Envira Gallery yet? Get started today!

If you enjoyed learning about WordPress YouTube plugins, check out our list of The Best WordPress Instagram Plugins for Epic Feeds & More Followers.