Best WordPress Theme for Hosting Videos
WordPress is one of the most popular and free blogging platforms available today, and for good reason. With almost 500 million downloads and a community of more than 100 million users, WordPress offers a lot of flexibility for website creators who want to build their own platforms.
But as great as WordPress is, it’s not perfect for every single type of website. If you’re looking to host videos on your blog, then you might find that there are a few design flaws in the default video player that could be frustrating.
No Captions
WordPress by default doesn’t include any captions in its video player. This can be a real pain if you have a video featuring speaking heads with no background music or dialogue. It’s also pretty useless if you’re trying to post a quick video to inspire someone or introduce a new product.
Thankfully, WordPress is fairly easy to modify and add extra functionality to. If you’re looking for a free, flexible, and simple blogging platform, then you could do a lot worse than look into WordPress.com.’s official video plugin, WordFetcher.
No Post-Production
One of the things that makes videos so special is the fact that they can be shared and watched in their entirety without any interruptions. The lack of post-production on WordPress’ video player means that the visuals and sounds within the video need to be as good as the original source. This could be a problem if you don’t have a very high-end computer or device.
Thankfully, WordPress offers several ways to work around this. If you have a high-quality video camera, then you could record your own narration using software like Audacity. If you don’t have a camera but want to add a bit more polish to your videos, then you could always use one of the many free online video editors to add some titles and music, fix some of the more glaring problems, and ensure that the finished product looks as good as the original source. Better safe than sorry, right?
Uneven Video Heights
One of the problems you’ll inevitably encounter when trying to play back videos on WordPress is that some of them are taller than others. This can be an issue if you have a landscape-style video and the text on the page is supposed to be aligned with the top of the video. As a result, you’ll either have to choose which one you want displayed or crop the top of the video so that it fits perfectly on the page.
This problem can be easily solved by using a WordPress template that supports custom post types and flexible heights. One bonus of using a flexible-height template is that you can easily adjust the height of the blog post to fit the screen regardless of whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or computer monitor.
No Volume Controls
Last but not least, let’s not forget about the volume controls. If you have a really loud song or speech buried in the audio of a video, then it can be hard to watch or listen to. It would be great if there was some sort of volume control within the WordPress video player so that you could quickly adjust the volume without leaving the page.
As a result of the problems discussed above, if you’re looking for a blogging platform that can be used to host videos, then WordPress isn’t for you. It’s great if you just want to write and don’t need any video functionality, but for those who do, it might be better to look elsewhere.