Display Video as Featured Image/Thumbnail in WordPress

by | Mar 2, 2020 | Wordpress Tutorial | 11 comments

In this super quick/super cool tutorial, I’ll show you how to Display a Video as the WordPress Post Thumbnail or Featured Image. This is great for when you want to feature a video that people can preview or watch in a blog page instead of actually clicking into the article. Remember that this only works with WordPress posts, not pages. 

To display a video as a thumbnail featured image in WordPress:

  1. Create a new post
  2. Add the video share URL at the top of the post content
  3. Make sure “format” is selected under Screen Options
  4. Choose the “video” format
  5. Then publish!

That’s it! Now, wherever you have that post pull up, the video will show as the featured image.

As shown in the video, you can add a featured image into the post directly which will display that over the featured image from the YouTube video but will still play the video in the thumbnail.

P.S. Clients will LOVE this trick so be sure to make it sound like you’re a WordPress wizard when you show it off 🙂 Enjoy and have some fun!

Links mentioned in the video: