What's the best way to host Videos on my Wordpress site? (SEO-wise)

[Benavest]

I have a hard time choosing whether to stream my videos from certain platforms like vimeo, youtube, etc. or embedding the videos into my site, and I'm not quite sure which one Google would like to see more of? And which style will save my page speed from plummeting too much. Any ideas? Thanks guys

[sergeystefoglo]

Hey Joseph,

Great question. Typically, the only two options I recommend are either YouTube or Wistia.

The short answer is either of these platforms are great, but depending on your goals one might be better than the other.

If your goal is to increase traffic to your website, Wistia is typically the better option. This is because your videos are optimized to rank with Wistia, and your pages will actually rank with the videos.

YouTube is great for brand awareness and pushing a specific video strategy out to the world. This is because it's already a great platform and many people use it.

The good news? You can totally use both.

I've seen many brands upload a video on their site using Wistia and then upload that same video to YouTube 2 weeks later in order to grab the best of both worlds. I personally don't think this is necessary (it might also be confusing to users having similar content in two completely seperate places), but it's totally doable and legitimate.

Hope that helps!

[hector-olguin]

If you want your videos to rank in search results under your domain, you should look at hosting your videos on with a service like Wistia or SproutVideo and then embed that video on your webpage.

I thought they rounded it up nicely here: https://wistia.com/doc/video-seo

Unless you have a really good & fast webhost with video expertise (you will need multiple video formats for each video), you are better off not self-hosting for page speed.