Nearly every website uses multimedia sections on their website when it comes to better publicity and user engagement. For decades, videos and marketing strategies have been going hand-in-hand, and now, it’s taking over long text-based content.
According to HubSpot, relevant embedded video content increases conversions by 86%. Besides, 80% of video marketers stated that video has directly increased sales rates.
The reason behind this is video contents allow sharing information interactively and creatively. And, this way, it helps audiences to connect with you more.
So, if you want to put videos on your WordPress site, the WordPress video gallery plugins with thumbnails will work great. The usual WordPress tools do help to display videos but in case of using a lot of videos, you’ll need to add video thumbnails for a better workflow.
Therefore, here, we come up with the 10 best WordPress video gallery plugins with thumbnails (free) for you. So, let’s get started.
Why Do You Need a Plugin for WordPress Video Galleries?
When you have a WordPress site, you can make the most out of video content. There is no way to deny that video content is an excellent way to communicate with the targeted audience, increase traffic and sales.
As you can see, there are huge benefits of using videos on your website. But, only putting videos on your site won’t work for you. If you want to take all these advantages, you need to represent your video content well and ensure everything is top-notch.
In that case, using WordPress video gallery plugins make this process much easier and effective as well. Most WordPress video gallery plugins are responsive, easy to use, don’t require experts help to handle, and come in all the required features to optimize and display your videos.
No matter what your needs are, these plugins are always ready to offer you the best without wasting any time. On that note, let’s figure out the best free WordPress video gallery plugins with thumbnails from the next section.
10 Best WordPress Video Gallery Plugin With Thumbnails Free 2023
Videos are one of the great ways to bring more visitors to your website and improve your SEO. To ensure doing it correctly and better than your competitors, the following plugins will be a great help for you.
So, these are our best collections of WordPress Video gallery plugins with thumbnails.
1. WordPress YouTube Video Gallery
WordPress YouTube video gallery is considered one of the best and free YouTube plugins for adding videos on WordPress. This highly responsive, latest API-based gallery plugin is really user-friendly. You can use this plugin without any fear of slow loading speed, as it is the most lightweight plugin ever.
It has lots of customization options to make your video content stand out from your competitors. If you want to display videos from YouTube channels, playlists, embed, or live stream on your site, this plugin is the perfect option to use doing all these. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or expert; you can make the most use of this plugin.
This useful plugin allows you to add multifunctional video galleries in multiple ways to display on your page. With this plugin, you can turn your website with YouTube videos into an engagement platform for the users in a minute.
WordPress YouTube Video Gallery Features:
- Not only allow you to display video galleries but also grid view, gallery slider, and popup view.
- Import video from YouTube playlist or user playlist automatically.
- You can fetch the video order, video limit, and matching duration.
- Compatible with all modern browsers and supports multisite.
- Advanced settings for background, typography, enqueue or dequeue Script/CSS.
- Allows showing multiple players/playlists.
2. All-In-One Video Gallery
As the name implies, a lightweight, responsive, and no coding plugin that helps you add videos makes them scalable, SEO-optimized, searchable, and many more in a minute. This all-in-one plugin is suitable for all types of websites to display any type of video, from a single video to larger videos.
With this plugin, you can categorize your video display options into a grid and list. Also, you can use a great range of features like player control, playback options, widgets, comment system, numeric pagination, and many more.
All-In-One Video Gallery Features:
- Supports MP4, WebM, OGV, and embedded players for example YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Dailymotion, and more.
- Able to add any third-party video player’s embed code.
- Create and group unlimited categories, sub-categories, and tags.
- 100+ settings for customizing the plugin as you need.
- Includes shortcode builder to help in building the gallery shortcode.
3. WP Video LightBox
This handy plugin allows you to directly embed videos onto any page using its lightbox overlay display. In case of displaying images, flash, YouTube, or Vimeo videos on your site, this plugin can help you out with its unique features.
It is a complete responsive plugin that makes your site mobile-friendly, and iPhone and iPad users can also enjoy the embedded videos. The best thing is it allows you to fetch the thumbnail for your video and use any thumbnails you want.
WP Video LightBox Features:
- You can set animation speed categories (fast/slow/normal).
- Load YouTube video over HTTPS.
- Allows showing the description of a popup in the overlay.
- You can enable privacy-enhanced mode in a YouTube video.
- Provides shortcodes for embedding YouTube videos.
4. Embed Plus for YouTube
Adding videos to WordPress sites often leads to slow loading speed. To ensure performance and fast loading speed, you can customize your WordPress videos in a wide variety of ways.
Here, the embed plus for YouTube plugin comes into play to customize your YouTube embed, gallery, channel, playlist, and even premier or live-streaming without impacting the site speed. You can make sure to defer JS, minifying CSS, and JS using this useful plugin.
You can easily handle all the complexity of YouTube embedding with this plugin’s advanced features. Posting videos on your site is a matter of a few seconds with this plugin.
Embed Plus for YouTube Features:
- Supports Facade modes that help in improving performance by loading a lighter player version.
- Both Gutenberg block editor and classic editor users can use this plugin.
- Allows to enable or disable simultaneous playback options for visitors.
- Insert button for the editor’s visual and text mode.
- You can embed an entire YouTube channel as a playlist.
- Supports general playlist embedding, YouTube plugin migration, and shortcode for embedding multiple videos.
5. VideoPack
Using this easy-to-use plugin you can not only create a video gallery but also make video players, thumbnails, and multiple resolutions. You can add several fields to your uploaded video to the WordPress media library.
The best part is, you can generate thumbnails from all your videos with the installed FFMPEG on your server. The shortcode of this plugin makes it most flexible to build a responsive video player.
VideoPack Features:
- Compatible with the classic editor.
- Includes an option to create a popup video gallery.
- Automatically select the player size and resolutions.
- It offers multiple H.264 resolutions and also provides a button to select the resolution manually for the users.
- Make videos automatically with the help of installed FFMPEG.
6. Gallery Blocks With LightBox
A highly responsive plugin with advanced features to make your video gallery stand out from others. It is built on the latest technologies, and you can use this plugin with much ease with its user-friendly manner and functionalities.
While using this plugin, you can make the most use of its drag and drop gallery building experience. Besides that, it features fully responsive support, which makes your videos compatible with both mobile and desktop styles.
In fact, you can set custom styling for every gallery using it. So, if you need to experience a highly interactive, intuitive, and superfast plugin that transforms your video gallery with style, this one’s for you.
VideoPack Features:
- Provides 6 different blocks.
- Supports video MP4, YouTube, and Vimeo by default.
- Featured with the automatic slide show, multitouch gesture, and full-screen support.
- Includes SVG icon, unlimited colors, browser feature controls like scrollbar, mouse wheel, and right-click prevention.
- Allows social sharing (Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest).
7. YouTube Gallery
A YouTube video gallery plugin for WordPress that is designed with simplicity. It helps you to display YouTube videos on your WordPress site in the gallery or grid view.
What makes this plugin so useful is, it makes all YouTube video pages responsive and adjusted to the container. This way, you don’t need to take the hassle of setting the height and weight.
However, it will automatically create your YouTube video pages, just after you paste the video ID on the video page. Other than that, you will get the option for changing the dimension of thumbnails offered by YouTube as your accordance.
YouTube Gallery Features:
- Provides 2 video gallery pages like Gallery, and Grid Gallery for YouTube videos.
- Display the thumbnail navigation of the YouTube video at the bottom.
- Offers 3 shortcodes for displaying videos per page, with category, and with tags.
- For the grid gallery, it displays the video thumbnail in a 4 column layout with high resolutions.
- Allows adding content and exerts (displayed on the gallery page and right below the main page) for every YouTube video of your site.
8. Video Gallery– YouTube Playlist, Channel Gallery by YotuWP
Video gallery by YotuWP is a responsive solution for embedding YouTube videos on your site. A really user-friendly plugin that you can use to embed videos from YouTube video playlist, channel, username, list of video IDs, and single video with video URL.
With this plugin, you can set a big player at the head of your gallery, and the video will be played once clicking on the thumbnail or title of the gallery. However, you can ensure keeping viewers on your site for longer with this plugin’s responsive layouts and video gallery.
Video Gallery – YouTube Playlist, Channel Gallery Features:
- 3 different layouts like Grid, List, and mix which allows changing the column numbers via settings.
- You can use 2 different player modes (large and model/popup/lightbox) on your site.
- Comes in shortcodes to use on page builders, widgets, and product descriptions.
- Allow customizing button color and button style.
- Provides pages and options for loading more buttons.
9. Gallery — Image and Video Gallery With Thumbnails
This plugin comes with a set of fully customizable designs to fit your website design. You can professionally display your galleries with awesome views with this plugin. Also, it allows you to create your own design and make the most out of your creative mind.
It’s really easy to create an unlimited number of galleries and albums with this plugin’s handy and easy-to-use admin panel. Aside from that, it brings a lot of advantages to your website with its useful free features and helps you to show videos instantly on your site.
Image and Video Gallery With Thumbnails Features:
- Works effectively with all modern browsers and WordPress versions.
- Allows changing the position, border width, color, opacity, and radius.
- You can set thumbnails cropping width and height.
- Compatible with WordPress themes also.
- You can control the bar icon sizes, height and set the number of columns.
10. Gallery, Images, Slider in Robo Gallery
An all-in-one plugin that can be used for video galleries, images, and sliders. Doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie or expert, you can create your video gallery within a few minutes with this fast and fully responsive plugin.
This free plugin has the proficiency to upload multiple videos at a time. It’s all highly customizable features and designs that help you to work with freedom of creativity. Being responsive, it will make your videos compatible with different device screen sizes like mobile and desktop.
Gallery, Images, Slider in Robo Gallery Features:
- Implement 5 types of one wizard with no limits, like Image grid, mosaic, masonry, Polaroid, and YouTube gallery.
- Allow you to create your own galleries’ tree with its multi-categories album support.
- Compatible with Gutenberg and all latest browsers like IE, Firefox, Safari, opera, and chrome.
- Advances pagination functions
- Social sharing option with deep linking functionality in lightbox.
How to Create a WordPress Video Gallery With Thumbnails?
Once you choose the best-suited plugin for you, then you should move forward to create the video gallery with thumbnails for your site.
By following really simple steps, you can add YouTube, YouTube playlist, HTML5, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and iframe videos to create a WordPress video gallery with thumbnails within a few minutes.
In this section, we’ll use the WordPress YouTube Video Gallery plugin to share the steps.
Step 1: Install WordPress YouTube Video Gallery
You can install it just like any other plugin. Simply log in to your WordPress dashboard. Select the Plugin menu and click Add New. Now, type WordPress YouTube Video Gallery into the search bar. Once you found the plugin simply click on the Install button and after the installation is done Activate it, and it’s ready to use.
Step 2: Add Video Gallery with Thumbnails to WordPress Page
- Navigate to YouTube Gallery from your WordPress dashboard and click Publish. If you want, you can make some changes and then publish.
- Once you publish, you’ll get a shortcode just under the publish button.
- Copy that shortcode, go to Pages > Add New. Then add a title and click on the (+) button, select the shortcode option and paste the code into the box.
- From the same page, choose Document, you’ll get it at the right sidebar. Then change the page attribute template to full-width template and publish.
Step 3: Adding API Key
- View your main page, and you’ll see something like this, “Please set your API key here” if the API is not set in advance.
- Simply click on the setting page, and it will take you to another page.
- Select the “How to get API key”, and from here select the Google API console and then a prompt will appear. Just like the below image, put a tick on both the options and click agree and continue.
- Now, choose the Credential button from the API & Service page, select Create project, again select Create.
- Once the API key is created, select the + create credentials > API Key.
- Lastly, copy your API key and paste it on your WordPress dashboard’s API Key box.
- Save all these changes, and you can visit the main page to see the video and the changes.
Step 4: Single Video Adding
- Just like before, go to the YouTube Gallery from the WordPress dashboard and select Add New.
- Give a title, change the display mode if needed, copy your video ID and paste it into the video ID box and then publish it.
- After that, copy the shortcode and paste it just like before beneath the first one and update it.
Which Is the Best WordPress Video Gallery Plugin for You?
This is the end of our best WordPress video gallery plugin list. We’ve covered all the free plugins for you in this guide. To figure out the best plugins, we’ve used and tested several plugins and listed out all the above ones. All of these work effectively with their specific features and facilities.
However, for those, who are looking for a feature-rich plugin with more flexibility and convenience to display videos on their site, I’ll suggest using the WordPress YouTube Video Gallery.
On the other side, if you are focused on a full-fledged video gallery plugin that can display videos from several platforms, VideoPack and All-In-One Video Gallery will be a better option for you.
So, choose the correct one and give it a try and let us know which one you choose and how it works for your site by commenting below. Also, you can share your thoughts about this guide.
I’m Nazmul, a Technical SEO specialist dedicated to helping clients optimize every aspect of their search performance. My expertise covers the full range of technical SEO needs, from enhancing website structures to staying on top of the latest search engine developments. My passion for the technical side of SEO ignited early in my digital marketing career and has only grown over time. With each project, my skills have expanded—starting in agencies and now working hands-on within SEO tools to deliver impactful solutions for clients.
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