WordPress and the Challenge of Uploading Large Videos

Among the many functions of WordPress is its ability to upload various types of media files, including large videos.. One must be well-prepared, as uploading these to WordPress can be a daunting task that many website creators and e-commerce store owners fear.

Why is Uploading Large Videos Challenging for WordPress?

Uploading large video files can take up a lot of disk space on your server, which can affect your website’s loading time, making your website slow and unstable, and even potentially crashing your server. However, despite these challenges, there are effective ways to upload large videos to WordPress without compromising your website’s performance.

What are the Methods for Uploading Large Videos to WordPress?

1. Compress Your Video Files

Compressing your video files is one of the best ways to upload large videos to WordPress. This process involves reducing the video’s size without losing its quality. Adobe Premier, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Handbrake are just a few of many video compression software that you can use to compress your video files.

2. Use a Video Hosting Service

A video hosting service can help you to upload large videos to WordPress without affecting the website’s performance. YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Brightcove, and Vidyard are examples of video hosting services that host videos on their server, which can be easily embedded onto your WordPress website. Using video hosting services can help reduce the load time of your website and ensures that your video can be watched by a larger audience.

3. Increase Your PHP Memory Limit

Increase your PHP memory limit to enable you to upload large video files. When uploading large files, they can take a lot of memory, and therefore may exceed the default PHP memory limit. This can result in an error message appearing every time you try to upload such files. The solution is to increase the PHP memory limit by editing the website’s PHP configuration file or add a code snippet to the website’s functions.php file.

4. Use a CDN

Another solution to uploading large videos to WordPress without affecting website performance is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN caches your website’s content, including videos, and delivers it to your audience from the server closest to their location. As such, it helps to reduce latency and speeds up the delivery of your videos. Additionally, a CDN helps to lower the load on your server, improving your website’s overall speed, performance, and security.

5. Optimize Your Website’s Performance

To be able to upload large videos to WordPress, it’s necessary to optimize your website’s performance by installing caching plugins, using a lightweight theme, optimizing your website’s images, and minimizing the number of plugins. This optimizes the website, reducing the load on your server, and ensuring that your website can handle large files without any issues.

6. Use a Plugin Designed for Large Files

Plugins that are designed to compress, optimize and offload your videos have made it much easier to upload large files to WordPress. These plugins come with unique features that include video compression, optimization, CDN integration, security features, and image optimization. They can be found in WordPress repositories and additional paid versions for premium features.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges of uploading large videos to WordPress, using any of the methods above can make this process easier and faster. By optimizing your website’s performance, compressing your videos, using a video hosting service, increasing your PHP memory limit, using a CDN or installing a plugin designed for large files, WordPress can handle any video upload.