Display Video as Featured Image/Thumbnail in WordPress
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:
- Create a new post
- Add the video share URL at the top of the post content
- Make sure “format” is selected under Screen Options
- Choose the “video” format
- 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:
Perfect, thanks!
Cool trick, this is very helpful. I will have to try it with Vimeo to see if that works. I have a client who also wants to do a faq section with videos and this trick will come in handy. Thanks for sharing!
Lori let me know if it works for Vimeo as well!
Will do Josh 🙂
Great video, and thanks for the tip. I’m going to start re-purposing my YouTube videos over to my blog site using the setup you describe.
Quick note for those who don’t know: the Video Format in WordPress Gutenberg is found under the Status and Visibility section.
Great to know – thanks Bakari! I think I’ll be doing the same with my posts now too 🙂
Quick note for those who don’t know: the Video Format in WordPress Gutenberg is found under the Status and Visibility section. – can you explain how to do this – I can’t see how to make my videos display as a thumbnail anymore with the new wordpress setup
I’ll look into this, Saff! I still use the classic editor so I’m not too familiar with the Gutenberg settings yet either to be honest.
I guess it is not possible in Gutenberg, nor with classic editor plugin on top as post formats ar gone 🙁
Yeah this doesn’t work in the berg. Looking for a solution on that.
Great tutorial. This tutorial will help me to display a video as a featured image in WordPress. Thanks for sharing this tutorial.