Adding Video to Your Website

Putting video on your website is the best way to get your message across.
Video is an engaging medium that can communicate complex topics clearly and concisely, without a ton of effort from the viewer. At Wistia, our goal is to make it easy to embed video on your website, and get actionable analytics from your viewers interactions. This guide is designed to get you from a blank slate to having a great video streaming over the web, powered by Wistia.


Public sharing is right for you if you want to:

• Add video to your website, blog, or wiki
• Track how your audience as a whole watches your video
• Track how individuals watch your video

To start, here is a short overview of the public sharing process:

To get started, we're going to need some great video content. Already have your video? Excellent! Skip to Step 2 below.

If you're looking to create some new video, there are lots of ways to do it. You could:

• Hire a camera crew
• Record a screencast
• Shoot footage yourself
• Host a webinar

If you are looking to hire a videographer, there are tons of great video producers out there - you just need to know where to look. From producing, to shooting, to editing, to formatting - getting the content right is just as important as how you present it.

Having trouble finding a great producer? Check out 50 Grove, a site designed to hook up great producing talent with firms that need great video.

Getting your video onto the web starts by uploading it to your Wistia account. Don't have one? Click here to start your free 15 day trial today.

Uploading Video to Wistia is as Simple As:

• Creating a New Project
• Select the “Upload Media” option from under the green “Project Actions” drop-down menu.
• Check out our guide to uploading for more information

Once it is uploaded, Wistia creates several versions of the video - perfect for serving on multiple browsers and mobile devices. Once the video is encoded, it is ready to be embedded onto your site.

Embed codes are pieces of code that live inside your web page and are useful for serving up video. To grab the embed code of a video you have added to your Wistia account, first navigate to the page where you can play the video itself (also known as the “viewing page”). Select the ”</> Embed” option under the green “Media Actions” drop-down menu.

Clicking this ”</> Embed” option will take you to the Wistia Embed Screen. This is where you can make some basic changes to the look and feel of your video presentation easily. Click here for a complete guide to interacting with the Embed Screen. Once you have all the settings set the way you would like them, copy the embed code from the top box.

Once you have the Embed code, you can place it in an HTML file of your web page editor, or into the edit page of a CMS. To see a breakdown of the Content Management Services Wistia works well with, and basic description of using Wistia with the CMS, check out our integration page.

Now that your video is embedded on your webpage, you can use Wistia's tracking analytics to see how your viewers are interacting with the content. To see how your account is performing as a whole, start by selecting “Trends” from under the Stats drop-down menu.

If instead you'd like to jump straight to the stats for a specific video, first open up the video in your account. Once you are on the media page for that video (where you can watch the video), select “Stats” from under the Media Actions drop-down menu.

Selecting “Public & Embed Stats” will take you to the Embedded Video screen, where you can see a list of your videos that are out there in the wild and the number of plays on each. Choose the video you would like to see stats on by clicking the thumbnail.

On the video embed stats page, you can see the detailed tracking statistics for each video. The overall interaction graph shows you how viewers are tuning in and out of your video on aggregate, and the individual heatmaps below show each individual viewing instance, right down to the second.

Wistia has lots of features that can help you get the most out of your publicly embedded video.

• You could embed a video playlist based on a Project in your account
• Use Wistia's Video SEO capabilities to bring leads to your website
• Create a video popover effect, to show off your content without using a lot of screen real estate
• Make a Post-Roll call-to-action after your video plays
• Add the Social Bar, to give your video player social tools like Facebook Likes
• Embed your video in a Mailchimp campaign
• Use the video player API, to control and interact with the Player in your own way
• …and so much more. Check out the documentation for more ways to use an embedded Wistia video, and email us at support@wistia.com if you ever have any questions.