Guides
Straight answers to the things that go wrong when you put a video on a website. No code needed for any of the first seven.
How to put a YouTube video on your website
What embed code is, how to get it, and exactly where it goes in WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Shopify and a plain HTML page.
8 minute readGetting a video to behave
- How to make a video play automaticallyAutoplay only works with the sound off, and that is a browser rule rather than a setting anyone can change. What to do about it.6 min
- How to make a video loop on your websiteLooping is one checkbox here and a strange piece of trivia everywhere else. Why the usual instructions quietly fail on YouTube.5 min
- How to start a video at a specific momentSkip the intro, jump to the part that matters, or trim both ends, without editing or reuploading anything.5 min
- How to hide the YouTube logo, title and suggested videosAn honest list of what can be removed from a YouTube embed, what cannot, and the one approach that gets you a genuinely clean player.7 min
- How to add clickable chapters to a videoNamed buttons that jump straight to a moment, so nobody has to drag a scrub bar hunting for the bit they came for.6 min
- Why your page got slower after you added a videoA video player downloads about a megabyte before anyone presses play. What that does to your site and how to stop paying for it.7 min
If you write the markup yourself
The mechanics underneath the tool.
- Every YouTube embed parameter, and the ones that stopped workingA reference for the settings on a YouTube embed URL: what the player still honours and what it quietly ignores.
- Building your own controls for an embedded video playerWhat the browser lets you reach across an iframe boundary, and how to drive a player you cannot style.
- Responsive video embeds without the padding hackaspect-ratio replaced the padding-bottom trick years ago. What to use now, including for vertical video.
More are being written. If something is missing, theFAQ covers the shorter questions.