Want to create a video website like YouTube but are confused about where and how to start? You’re at the right place, at the right time!
In this post, I’ll show you how you can easily create a video website with WordPress. A website like YouTube. Also, add up a few quick tips on how you can promote it and make money through it.
Never created a website before? Don’t worry. This easy-peasy tutorial will guide you to set up your own video website in minutes.
Here are the steps to follow to create your YouTube-like Video website with WordPress:
- Efficient hosting and domain name
- Choosing a video theme for your YouTube clone website
- Customizing the theme to fit your needs
- Adding videos to your Video website
- Front end submission system on your Video submission website
- Monetizing your online Video portal website
- Video website maintenance
Table of Contents
You need an efficient hosting service and domain name for a video website
A video website should be able to deliver high-quality videos at a good speed. You have to keep in mind that none of your visitors would like waiting for your web page to load, or video to play. You have to make sure that your website’s performance is fast.
Therefore choose a host carefully. Because the performance of your website is very much dependent on the performance of your host.
For the best WordPress hosting, I recommend Bluehost. They are known for their uninterrupted service and good website performance.
Now, when you choose the best host, you need to have a domain name to start with. While you choose the hosting service package and proceed to checkout, you will be asked to enter your domain name or choose a new one.
If you already have a domain name registered, you can key it in. If you don’t have your domain registered yet, you can choose one, check out by providing necessary details.
Tip: If you want faster delivery and minimized response time for video loading, you can go for a CDN or Cloud hosting if that is affordable. If your website audience is scattered among different geographical regions, and the traffic is good enough, you can opt for these.
Choosing a WordPress Video Theme
Once, you have the domain and hosting service subscribed, you should move on to choose a WordPress theme for your video website.
Besides, you can choose from this list of Best Video WordPress themes to create online video streaming websites. WordPress themes are just like the ready to use websites. They are pre-designed and come with built-in features for your website.
This is why, for creating a Video website with WordPress, you won’t have to learn to code. Or even change a line of code to make it work the way you want. Everything can be managed by the intuitive options available at the back end of your theme. Just a few clicks and you can make your site work your way.
While there are many Video WordPress themes available in the theme market, for this post I am choosing the Video WordPress theme from Templatic for this article. It is a feature-rich and flexible theme.
Most of the hosting services, provide you with the feature on one-click WordPress install. To install WordPress, follow the steps mentioned by your host. So, install WordPress, login to your dashboard using the password you’ve chosen.
Once, you are there you can easily install the theme. After installing the theme, make sure that you insert the sample data by pressing the blue “Insert Sample data” button. Refer to the image given below. This will make your website look just like it appears in the demo.
With the sample data, you will get a better idea on how and where you want your screen elements. It is always better than to start off with a blank site.
Personalizing your WordPress video website
In the last section, we inserted the sample data and now we have a website. A website full of dummy data. Now is the time to customize it to fit the imagination of your personal website.
Changing the theme logo/site title
First, change the theme to make it look like “your own website”. You can easily change the logo and site identity of your website. You can create a logo and upload it to personalize your video website.
If you don’t already have a logo, or if you don’t want to display a logo, you can update the site title. Setting the site title means you just have to write down the name of your website. It will be displayed elegantly, and in bold instead of the logo.
Besides that, you can set your own site’s tagline, site logo, and favicon.
Colors, background and site elements
The next thing you would want to change about your website is the color scheme. We all have favorites, don’t we?
For your convenience, the color options are grouped. They are classified as primary, background, etc. So you can easily manage the colors of your website. Moreover, you can do so with a live preview!
So you can just play with different color combinations and settle for the one that looks best to you. It just gets easier because you can preview the color change before even saving it.
Organizing the content and pages
Thankfully, the WordPress themes come with ready to use features. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to settle for the features that the theme provides. You can change the look and feel of your website with the available options.
Setting up the menu
Menus are the most important navigational facility on a website. Before you set up the menus, you should make a list of all the most important pages on your website, that you think should go to the menu. Then you can focus on inter-related pages that should fall under one topic. For example, video categories can be the main topic whereas entertainment, educational, recipes, and comic can be the sub-topics.
This is the guide on how you can create WordPress menus.
Widgetized homepage lets you manage how your video website’s homepage looks
The homepage of the WordPress Video Theme – Vivo is totally made of different widgets placed at different widget areas. So if you wish to change the structure of the homepage, you just have to move the widgets into the required widget area.
You can move the widgets in and out of the widget area through drag and drop options. Adjust the widgets into pages’ sidebars, footer, etc. The homepage can be totally restructured using the available options.
Adding more features to your WordPress website
Even though the Vivo video theme is feature packed, and has all the functions that an ideal Video website should have, you can still add more features to your website. The free and plugins available for WordPress are like pluggable features into a website. Also, if you want fewer features, you can easily disable a few features.
Adding Videos to your WordPress website
We’re now done with the basic customization a theme needs to be set up on your website. Now is the time to add videos in your website. A video portal generally allows front-end video submission through which users of your website can register and upload their videos. However, you can also create your personal entertainment channels where no one but only you post the videos.
Creating Video Categories for your WordPress video website
Think, rethink and create a list of video categories that you want on your website. These categories will be shown to the users adding videos from the front end. Even when you, as an admin add a new video, you should make sure that you select a proper category.
Categories are important because they help keep the data on your site more organized. They also add to the user convenience when browsing through the videos on your website. The visitors of your website can instantly find the videos of their choice without wasting time on irrelevant videos.
Here’s how a category page will look :
Adding Videos through the back end (as an admin)
Videos on your video website can be added from the front end as well as the back end. As an admin of your website, you can add videos on your WordPress video website from the front end as well as the back end. When you are logged into your video website, you can add the videos to your site just like you add a new page or post.
Front end submission system on your Video submission website
This post is about how to create YouTube like video website with WordPress. And one of the most important features of YouTube is that it allows user registration and front end submission by the registered users.
However, If you don’t want to allow front-end video submission, just disable the feature. And you can have a simpler video website, or video blogging site, where only you can post videos under different categories. But if you want to create a YouTube-like video portal, you can keep this feature enabled.
User Registration and profile management on your Video website
What makes everyone’s life easier is that with this theme, the users won’t be required to fill up a lengthy registration form before being allowed to submit their videos. Separate registration and submission forms can get hard to manage.
The users are allowed to easily register on the video website by just providing their email address. The approved videos will be shown on the website with the author name. When the visitors click on the name of the author listed in the video, they will be redirected to the author profile page which is configured to show all the videos submitted by the author and other author info.
Any user who wants to change the profile info will be easily be able to do so. And the best thing about all of this is that all of the features discussed above, are
Video Submission from the front end
With the Vivo WordPress theme, you can allow the users to register on your website and upload their videos. The videos can be uploaded with the following three ways
- Video upload: You can upload your video file from your local computer
- Video URL: Just copy and paste the URL of the video
- Video embed code: From websites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. you can acquire the code to embed the video
So the visitors can choose from the options and upload their own video. You have to set if you want the user uploaded videos to be held for moderation or directly published. This can be set with a single click. However, it is highly recommended that you always moderate and check the content that the users submit before it goes online.
The user-submitted videos will be saved as a draft. You as an admin can decide if you want to publish them or not.
Maintaining your video portal
A website needs maintenance and regulation every once in a while. Generally, to maintain your Video WordPress website, you should check the following:
The content check
Be it a blog website, a business website, an eCommerce website or a video WordPress website, you should always keep a check on the content of your website. Regular cleanup and update of your website help a lot.
First of all, you should get rid of the redundant as well as outdated content from your website. You must remove all the content that consumes resources, without actually being productive or adding any value to your website.
Next, you can make sure that whatever content is on your website, is relevant. The videos are added under proper categories, etc.
Checking the user-submitted Videos
For a front-end submission-enabled video website portal, you need to keep a track of what your users, as well as a user, submitted content. Check your drafts to see if any new videos are submitted. If you find new videos submitted on your site, check the user’s authenticity, and the video content, and make sure it is added under a relevant category. Publish when everything is okay.
Alternately, if you find any content that violates the terms of use of your website, you can delete it. Besides, you can even have a look at the comments on the videos and manage the comments held for moderation.
Making money through your video Portal
Because managing a video website is not a cakewalk, you might sure expect some profit from it. There are multiple ways through which you can earn through your WordPress Video website.
While it solely depends on you whether you want to monetize your Video website or not, the followings are the easiest way to make money through your Video website.
Charge for displaying advertisements on your Video Portal
Displaying advertisement banners on your website is the easiest way to earn through it. It is the best way through which you can make money. And thankfully the vivo video WordPress theme comes with the ready to use advertisement widget for the purpose.
You can place the advertisement widget wherever you want – the sidebars, the footers, on the homepage etc. These advertisements can be of the products related to the videos on the site or anything. You can display multimedia advertisement using this widget. Ask the advertisements for their advertisement’s code and paste it into this widget.
Also, if you wish to use services like Google Adsense, you can still paste the code into this widget to start displaying targeted advertisements.
You can offer to advertise on your website at different prices. For the more prominent places on your website like the homepage or the submission page sidebar, you can charge more than that for advertising on the footer and sidebars.
Charging for featuring the videos in the banner
While creating video website with WordPress, the banner area in your website can display the video as a banner. The users who want maximum attention would want to have their video featured on the website banner. So you can charge them to highlight their video on your website banner.
For this, you can plan fixed rates per day or weeks. Therefore, if a user wants to feature their video on the banner for a week, they can pay a fixed price, and keep it there for 7 days. After 7 days, you can let other such users have a chance to get their video featured.
However, the theme currently does not allow to directly accept payments from the users. But you can opt for traditional payment processing like wire transfer or cheque.
Conclusion
So if you’ve been thinking of owning a video website for a while, now is the time to act. With this complete guide on how to create a video website, you should have an idea of what are the main steps in doing so. However, for the technical details on how each feature works and how to change the settings of your site, you can refer to the theme guide (most of the premium themes offer the theme installation and user guide, which explains how you can set up your website with the theme). Moreover, on purchasing the theme, you also get access to support. The support engineers will assist you when you set up your website.
Therefore, you can create a small or big video website very easily and manage it on your own. Even if you’re a beginner, you can begin as confidently as a programming pro!
Need a Knowledge Base on your Video website?
At times a video library is used for educational purposes. Creating a Documentation site is equally important in cases like this. You can use a Knowledge Base Plugin such as BasePress to create guides and documents for your users. Ultimately, in creating a thorough wiki site.
Along with the theme, you’d need attractive graphics to spice up your Video Website. There are unlimited graphic design services that you can use. A dedicated team ready for any of your graphic design needs.
Hope this guide will help you create a video website with WordPress easily. Good luck.