Do you want to create a video portfolio in WordPress?
Videos are an engaging medium that can display your skills and creativity in a way that static images can’t. By default, you can easily embed videos in WordPress, but you can’t display them in a portfolio-style layout.
In this article, we will show you how to easily create a video portfolio in WordPress without slowing down your website or writing code.
How to Get Started with Your Video Portfolio
First, you will need to start a WordPress blog or a website. If you already have one, then you can move to the next step.
WordPress allows you to easily embed videos in your blog posts and pages. However, it does not let you create a beautiful video portfolio out of the box.
For your portfolio, you will want to display your videos in a nice grid-based layout so that more videos can be viewed without a lot of scrolling.
You also need to make sure that the portfolio works on mobile devices and offers a good user experience. This can help improve your website rankings, as high-quality video content can lead to more organic traffic.
While you can upload a video to your WordPress site, we recommend using a third-party service like YouTube or Vimeo because videos are resource-intensive and can slow down your site.
Note: Envira Gallery also has a free plan. However, you will need a premium plan to unlock the Videos addon.
Upon activation, visit the Envira Gallery » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard to enter your license key. You can get this information from your account on the Envira Gallery website.
Next, you must head to the Envira Gallery » Addons page and locate the ‘Videos’ addon.
Once you do that, click the ‘Install’ button next to it. After that, you need to click ‘Activate’ to start using it on your website.
Now, it’s time for you to start creating your video portfolio. To do this, go to the Envira Gallery » Add New page from the WordPress admin sidebar.
Keep in mind that Envira Gallery allows you to create a gallery of your self-hosted videos as well as videos hosted on platforms like YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo.
However, we recommend using third-party video hosting services to avoid performance issues or problems with your WordPress hosting.
Upon uploading your videos on YouTube or Vimeo, you can add a name for your gallery and then click the ‘Select Files from Other Sources’ button.
This will launch the media library, where you have to switch to the ‘Insert Videos’ tab.
Here, you can add your video’s title, caption, and alt text. Once you do that, just add the video URL in the ‘Video URL’ field.
If you want to upload a video from your computer, then you can click the ‘Upload Media’ button.
You can also add more videos by clicking on the ‘Add Video’ button at the top. Then, repeat the process until you have added all the videos you wanted to show in your portfolio.
Once you are done, simply click the ‘Insert into Gallery’ button.
Envira will now show the thumbnails it fetched from your videos in the ‘Currently in your Gallery’ section.
Here, you can click the pencil icon on top of each thumbnail to change the alt text and captions, video heights, widths, and more.
Once you have done that, just switch to the ‘Configuration’ tab.
You can now choose your gallery layout, add gallery columns, enable lazy loading, change image dimensions, and add captions under the videos.
After that, switch to the ‘Lightbox’ tab from the left column and check the ‘Enable Lightbox’ option. Your videos will now play on the same page in a lightbox popup.
Next, switch to the ‘Videos’ tab and check the box next to the ‘Display play icon over gallery image’ option. That way, users can click on the play button to start watching your videos.
After that, you can scroll down to the ‘Video Lightbox Settings’ section and enable video autoplay, display video controls, add a progress bar or current time, enable video download, and more.
You can then also configure other gallery settings according to your liking. Once you are done, click the ‘Publish’ button at the top to store your settings.
Next, open the WordPress page or post where you want to add your video portfolio. Here, click the ‘+’ add block button to open the block menu and add the Envira Gallery block.
Once you do that, select the video portfolio gallery that you just created from the dropdown menu within the block itself.
Finally, click the ‘Publish’ or ‘Update’ button to store your settings.
You can now visit your WordPress site to view the video portfolio. This is what it looked like on our demo WordPress website.
Bonus: Add Your YouTube Feed to Your WordPress Site
Apart from creating a video portfolio, you can also add your entire YouTube feed to your WordPress site to drive traffic to your channel and increase user engagement.
This can also help improve your website rankings and allow you to showcase your skills and creativity within the video feed.
You can easily add a YouTube feed in WordPress with the Smash Balloon YouTube Feed plugin. It is the best WordPress YouTube gallery plugin on the market that comes with multiple feed types, customizable layouts, social sharing, and live stream support.
Upon plugin activation, all you have to do is connect your YouTube channel with WordPress.
Once you do that, your YouTube feed will be launched in the Smash Balloon builder, where you can customize the layout, add a subscribe button, change color schemes, and edit individual elements.
Our WPBeginner video site is a membership community where we offer free WordPress courses to our readers.
Many of you have asked how we benefit from offering these free resources.
Our main goal is to help users learn WordPress and bridge the knowledge gap. Our secondary goal is to promote our business by growing our email list.
In this article, we will show you how we use a video membership site to grow our email list, which helps us reach more customers and grow our business.
Note: This article is part of our WPBeginner Insider series, where we talk about the products we use to grow our business. WPBeginner Insider is published every other Thursday.
Here is a list of topics we will cover in this article:
Videos are the most engaging form of content, and building a membership community around videos helps us leverage that user engagement.
In fact, users are more likely to follow a video course online than other interactive training and educational materials.
The motivation behind offering free WordPress video courses on WPBeginner is to bridge the knowledge gap and help beginners learn WordPress for free.
Here is how Syed Balkhi, Founder and CEO of WPBeginner, puts it:
I am tired of self-proclaimed “blogging experts” charging hundreds of dollars to teach how to use WordPress. I believe basic education like this should be FREE. I created WPBeginner to offer users what I wish I had when starting out.
Syed Balkhi – Founder & CEO of WPBeginner
The following are some of the benefits of running a membership website.
Building authority in your niche – A membership community helps you establish your brand as an authority in the industry.
Make money online – We don’t monetize WPBeginner videos because we believe basic education like this should be free. However, you can replicate our strategy and monetize your membership site to generate recurring revenue for your business.
Build an Email List – A membership community can be used to build an email list and capture leads to grow your business.
Online membership subscriptions are a multi-billion dollar industry expected to be worth $1.5 trillion by 2025.
Plus, more than 48% of people do not mind paying a subscription fee to access exclusive content. (Source: Creator Economy Statistics)
As we explained earlier, we believe basic WordPress education should be free. That’s our main motivation behind WPBeginner’s video membership site.
Users simply visit the WPBeginner Videos website. From here, they can browse individual videos from our YouTube channel or sign up for our free WordPress courses.
After creating their free account, they will get access to all our WordPress courses. In return, we add users to our email list, where they get subscribed to our weekly WPBeginner newsletter.
These courses are designed to be comprehensive and well-structured. Users can follow them at their own pace. And they can move on to a different course at any time.
That said, let’s take a detailed look at how we use our membership site to grow our email list.
1. Build Authority With a Video Membership Website
We use MemberPress for our video membership website. It is the best WordPress membership plugin on the market that makes it very easy to build a subscription-based membership community online.
It is incredibly easy to use and set up. This is important because we didn’t want to spend too much time managing software instead of creating content.
It comes with MemberPress Courses, which allows us to easily add and manage courses.
Courses are presented to the users in an easy-to-follow layout. This was important for us because our users are mostly beginners.
It integrates with other tools and services like email marketing services, contact form plugins, top WordPress page builders, and more.
Adding Courses in MemberPress
Adding courses in MemberPress is quite easy. You can create a curriculum with sections and lessons, add quizzes to your courses, and more.
Another feature that many course creators may find useful is the ability to drip content instead of just giving it all at once.
Access Control for Subscribers Only
As a membership plugin, MemberPress lets us restrict courses behind a free membership plan (you can add paid subscriptions, too).
Users are required to sign up and then log in to access these courses. Users are then added to our mailing list to receive weekly WPBeginner updates.
Free but premium subscriber-only content helps us build a loyal following of users. It also establishes the WPBeginner brand as a go-to resource for all things WordPress.
Drip offers powerful automation features that help marketers create workflows for better user engagement.
You can personalize emails based on user data and activity on your site. When this personalization is combined with automation, emails become more relevant, meaningful, and beneficial for customers.
User segmentation allows you to target users based on the data they share and their activity on your site.
Adding Video Membership Subscribers to Drip
MemberPress comes with integrations for all top email marketing companies, including Drip.
This allows you to automatically add users to your Drip email list when they sign up.
Optionally, you can use tags to segment video membership site users. This helps you target those users with personalized messages and on-boarding emails.
3. Convert Visitors Into Leads With a High-Converting Signup Page
MemberPress does a fantastic job of displaying courses. However, we still needed to create landing pages for our video membership website.
We have an in-house design team and developers, so we can afford a custom theme that matches our brand’s design and style.
SeedProd comes with an intuitive page builder, which makes it incredibly easy to create custom, on-demand landing pages.
It also includes many landing page designs optimized for conversion and sales. Just replace it with your text and images, and you are good to go.
You can easily add registration, user login, and sign-up forms. Plus, it works with major email marketing platforms, helping you easily add users to your email list.
SeedProd works regardless of which WordPress theme you are using. It can even be used to create custom WordPress themes without writing any code.
Transform Your Pages into a Lead-Generating Machine
We use landing pages for different sections of the video membership website.
For example, on the default landing page, we showcase videos from our YouTube channel.
These videos are always publicly available on the WPBeginner YouTube channel.
However, showcasing them here provides users with free content immediately. Users can watch the videos without leaving the page.
There are also calls to action on the landing page to join WPBeginner Academy (our course subscription).
Clicking on the sign-up button takes users to our sign-up page. Now, if you have run an eCommerce business, then you might already be familiar with abandoned carts.
Many users leave at this point before signing up. To convince them to join our video membership site, this page showcases testimonials and course features, along with a sign-up form.
This allows us to further explain the benefits of our online videos and convince people to sign up for these free resources.
4. Craft Unique Sign-Up and Login Forms for Enhanced User Interaction
As a website administrator, you will need to provide a seamless and coherent user experience throughout your website.
WordPress themes don’t come with sign-up or login forms by default. This can hurt the user experience as forms across your website will not be consistent.
We use WPForms to create custom sign-up and login forms for our video membership site. It is the best WordPress form builder on the market and allows you to create all types of forms for your site, including login and sign-up forms.
Why Do We Use WPForms?
It is easy and creates beautiful forms that look great on all devices.
It lets us create custom login and registration forms, which we use on our video membership sign-up landing page and the login screen.
It supports the biggest email services, allowing us to easily add emails to Drip (the email marketing platform we use).
How We Use WPForms?
We use a custom sign-up form made with WPForms on our sign-up landing page.
OptinMonster is the best lead generation software on the market. It allows you to nudge users into signing up with beautiful marketing campaigns like lightbox popups, slide-in popups, countdown timers, sticky header/footer, and more.
PushEngage is a push notification software that allows you to send custom messages to user browsers regardless of which device they are using.
It has powerful personalization and targeting rules, allowing you to create personalized messages that are more effective. This enables you to target users once they have left your website and prompt them to return.
A video membership website helps you build a loyal following, which you can then send to your social media accounts to boost your followers.
Smash Balloon helps you bring your socials to your WordPress site. We use it on our community tab to showcase our X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube posts. It also works with Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
All in One SEO for WordPress is the best WordPress SEO plugin with the most comprehensive SEO toolkit for WordPress websites.
Apart from the usual SEO tools, it has advanced XML sitemaps, a redirect manager, comprehensive schema markup support, Link Assistant, search stats, and more. (See more AIOSEO features).
We use it across our entire website, including our video membership website, to improve our SEO and get more traffic from search engines.
All your marketing efforts need to be properly tracked to monitor their success and make data-driven decisions. Otherwise, you won’t know if your strategies are actually helping you get more signups to your membership site.
We use MonsterInsights for that. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and helps you track site visitors. It helps you track conversions, which lets you measure the success of your video membership site, email forms, landing pages, and more.
MonsterInsights even allows you to track the customer journey on membership websites if you are using MemberPress. This lets you see the steps that users take to sign up on your video membership site and use that information to get more signups.
Are you looking for a WordPress theme for crowdfunding?
Many WordPress themes are geared towards corporate or blogging websites and may not be a good fit to help you raise funds for your organization or cause.
In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress themes for crowdfunding and fundraising websites.
Building a Crowdfunding Website With WordPress
Crowdfunding helps startups, charities, and individuals raise money for their projects. It allows you to collect small contributions from individuals to reach your fundraising goals.
Many of these projects use crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter to run their campaign. However, you will also need your own website to better showcase your idea, mission, or cause.
This is where WordPress comes in. It’s the world’s most popular content management system, powering over 43% of all websites on the internet.
A self-hosted WordPress site gives you the flexibility and functionality to easily integrate with all popular third-party services you may be using for crowdfunding.
To get started, you will need a WordPress hosting account and a domain name. A domain name is your site’s address on the web, like wpbeginner.com or google.com. Web hosting is the storage for all your website files.
We recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest web hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.
Bluehost is offering WPBeginner readers a big discount on hosting, plus a free domain name and free SSL certificate.
Next, you will need to choose a theme for your website. You can select any theme from our expert pick below. If you need help installing the theme, then just check out our guide on how to install a WordPress theme.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress themes for crowdfunding.
Astra is a fast and lightweight WordPress multipurpose theme that works well for crowdfunding sites. You can easily add a 1-click starter template and customize it to give details about your organization or project.
You can use Astra with any popular drag-and-drop page builder plugin, such as Elementor Pro or Visual Composer. It’s also fully compatible with the WordPress block editor.
Astra also works seamlessly with all popular WordPress plugins, including crowdfunding plugins. This helps you raise money and take donations easily.
SeedProd is the best WordPress website and theme builder. It comes with several ready-made website templates, including a fully functional layout for your crowdfunding site.
You can import any template in one click and customize it with SeedProd’s built-in drag-and-drop builder. It’s beginner-friendly and gives you easy access to all the tools you need to design your website.
Moreover, it integrates with your favorite tools and plugins. SeedProd is the best choice for making a crowdfunding website, and we fully recommend it.
Divi is a WordPress theme plus page builder plugin that gives you an easy front-end editor for your website. It uses a responsive design and is also created to be SEO-friendly.
You can use Divi’s thousands of templates to start your website quickly. They have a range of community and non-profit layout packs that could be perfect for your crowdfunding or charity site.
OceanWP is a free and flexible WordPress theme. You can also choose the Pro version, which comes with multiple website templates that you can use to start your site quickly.
Because OceanWP is a fully responsive theme, your website will look good on all devices. You can add a custom logo, social icons, and more.
Ultra is a dynamic and flexible theme that could be the perfect fit for your crowdfunding efforts. It ships with several ready-made websites that can be installed with one click. You can then replace the content with your own to create your site quickly.
Ultra also has an integrated drag and drop page builder, which allows you to create beautiful page layouts of your own. Inside, you will also find sections to add a portfolio, photo galleries, testimonials, events, and more.
You may also want to add a plugin such as Easy Digital Downloads if you are providing an exclusive download in return for a donation.
Hestia Pro is a beautiful multipurpose WordPress theme that could work perfectly for your crowdfunding website. It is fully compatible with all the best WordPress plugins, so you can easily extend your WordPress website with new features.
Plus, Hestia Pro is retina-ready. That means your website will look great on all devices, even the most recent smartphones.
Monochrome is a minimalist WordPress theme that is stylish and simple at the same time. It’s optimized for great performance and won’t slow your site down.
Monochrome features a widgetized homepage layout, which helps you set up your website easily. It also includes a customizable header, theme options panel, widget areas, and full WooCommerce plugin support.
Struct is another modern WordPress theme that is perfect for crowdfunding. Designed for businesses and startups, it features a drag-and-drop homepage layout with a large fullscreen header at the top.
It includes unlimited color choices, custom widgets, a portfolio, photo galleries, projects, testimonials, an FAQ section, and more. It also works with all popular page builder plugins, so you can create your own page layouts if needed.
Nayma is a multi-purpose WordPress theme that can be easily used for crowdfunding projects. It uses modules as building blocks to create page layouts and has all the commonly used web elements available as modules. You can drag and drop them anywhere on your pages.
Plus, Nayma includes several ready-made websites that you can use as a starting point. It has unlimited custom sidebars, sliders, icon fonts, Typekit font support, testimonials, pricing tables, a contact form, and more.
Sydney Pro is another powerful WordPress theme with flexible customization options. It can be used as a one-page or multi-page theme and comes with built-in sections for your portfolio, team members, testimonials, clients, and galleries.
The theme also includes several starter templates, page layouts, custom widgets, and social media integration. It’s also eCommerce-ready with full WooCommerce support. It can also be used with popular WordPress membership plugins.
Essence Pro is an elegant WordPress theme suitable for crowdfunding, landing pages, and sales page websites. The homepage features a large fullscreen header with prominent call-to-action buttons. It has a widgetized layout, allowing you to set up the homepage using drag-and-drop content widgets.
The theme uses beautiful parallax effects to create an engaging experience for your users. It’s WooCommerce-ready and comes with a simple theme options panel and WordPress live customizer support.
Charity Fundraiser is a free WordPress theme for charities and non-profits to create crowdfunding websites. It features an elegant layout designed to showcase your cause and encourage donations from your supporters and backers.
The theme customization options can all be accessed using the live theme customizer. You can change the header image, image slider, and background colors and add social media links.
Inspiro is another great choice for a WordPress crowdfunding theme. It comes with built-in support to easily add videos as a fullscreen background. It also includes a beautiful video lightbox popup for an engaging viewing experience.
Inspiro has a drag-and-drop homepage layout and offers integration with a free page builder plugin. Other notable features include page templates, a portfolio section, a hero banner, gallery templates, custom widgets, and full WooCommerce support.
Corner is one of the best WordPress themes for tech startups, small businesses, and non-profits. It comes with a sidebar homepage layout that lets you display your welcome message, navigation menu, and social media icons in the sidebar.
The theme integrates with several plugins to let you add a portfolio, testimonials, a contact form, Google Maps, and more. All the theme options are easy to set up, and a 1-click demo content installer is also available for a quick start.
Brizy is a multipurpose WordPress theme with lots of template options. Their Hope template is perfect for charities and non-profits engaging in crowdfunding and fundraising campaigns. The theme includes slider layouts, a 1-click demo content installer, and Brizy’s visual drag-and-drop page builder. It has support for popular WordPress plugins for non-profits.
Brizy’s features include multiple color schemes, event management, multiple layouts, and social media integration. It can also be used to create multilingual WordPress sites with WPML.
Balance is a great business theme designed to put your brand in the center. Perfect for a crowdfunding website, Balance is a great theme that comes with a modern and stylish homepage layout. This allows you to feature your projects and boost your conversions, supporters, and backers.
It’s eCommerce-ready and has beautiful templates for shop and product pages. Other features include multiple blog styles, color schemes with unlimited customizations, an Instagram widget, custom fonts, and a logo.
Spencer is a multipurpose WordPress theme in the minimalist design tradition. It has a sticky navigation menu with multiple sections on the homepage where you can add featured blog posts, social media icons, and an email subscription form.
The homepage can be set up by simply adding content widgets to create your page layout. It also includes social media integrations and content discovery features.
Advance Startup is a stylish and free WordPress theme for business websites. It’s easy to set up and features beautiful typography, an elegant design, and a simpler theme setup.
The theme supports a custom header, custom footer formats, and a custom background. It has different page templates and is multilingual-ready with RTL language support.
Presence is a sleek WordPress theme for mobile apps or any other product website. Its homepage features a prominent call-to-action button on top of a full-width header image.
The theme comes with a dual navigation menu, social media integration, icon fonts, and custom widgets. It can be used on multilingual sites using WPML.
Indigo is a stunningly beautiful and very easy-to-use WordPress theme. It’s designed to be a multipurpose theme, allowing you to choose your own layouts and styles without writing any code. It includes several ready-made websites that you can install with 1-click to import demo content.
If you don’t want to start with a ready-made website, then you can just drag and drop modules to create your own layout. Indigo features beautiful typography, stunning templates for galleries, portfolios, services, testimonials, and many more customization options.
Polity Lite is a stylish and modern campaign theme that could be a great crowdfunding option for a charity, NGO, or political organization.
It includes the options for a custom header and custom logo and is also translation-ready to create a site for a global audience. Polity Lite also includes a social media icon menu.
Crowdfunding With WordPress: Tips for Success
How you run your crowdfunding campaign in WordPress depends on what platform you are using to raise funds. Here are some brief instructions for Kickstarter and WPForms.
Adding Your Kickstarter Project in WordPress
If you are using Kickstarter, you will first need to visit your Kickstarter project page.
On your project page, click on the ‘Embed’ button.
This will bring up a popup.
You need to click the link to embed your project on an external site.
Then, simply copy the embed code.
You can copy it for either the project video or the widget.
Now, you need to edit the post or page where you want to display your Kickstarter project. You can also add it to a text widget in your sidebar.
You can add the code into an HTML block in the WordPress block editor. If you are using the Classic Editor, then don’t forget to switch to the text editor mode.
Simply paste the embed code and save your post, page, or widget. You can now visit your website to see it in action.
You can also collect recurring donations with WPForms. And the best part is that WPForms is easy to use with a drag-and-drop form builder to add fields, text, and donate buttons and integrate payment methods to your WordPress forms.
Alternate: You can also use WP Simple Pay to accept donations with other payment methods. WP Simple Pay is the best Stripe payment plugin for WordPress. It lets you accept Giropay payments and Affirm payments for donations.
Convert Website Visitors into Subscribers
Most people visiting your website will probably leave without donating to your project or cause, even if they support it. The best way to keep those users engaged is to start building your email list right away.
OptinMonster helps you convert abandoning visitors into subscribers. This allows you to keep those users engaged and eventually convert them into donors.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress themes for crowdfunding. You may also want to check out our other WordPress guides for crowdfunding, donations, and fundraising campaigns.
