If you have a website and want to take it to the next level, then video content is the way to go. It’s great for increasing engagement and keeping your visitors on the page longer than text content. WordPress makes it easy to embed video content with its Youtube embedder or shortcode embed system, but if you want more control, you’ll need a video plugin.

Video plugins make it easier to add videos and offer advanced video controls such as video playback, customization options for video display, and integration with popular video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. They can help you create product demos, showcase your portfolio, or simply share educational videos.

If you’re looking for the right video plugin for your website, there are plenty to choose from. This is a list of the best WordPress video plugins explained, along with their features, pros, cons, and pricing options.

That being said, let’s start with what you should consider when picking a video plugin for your website.

What to consider before choosing the perfect video plugin for your site?

1. Consider your goals

Before you choose a video plugin to add to your WordPress website, it’s essential to think about why you want to add videos in the first place. Understanding your goals for adding videos will help you choose a plugin that best suits your needs.

For example, to increase user engagement, you might want a plugin that includes features such as autoplay, looping, or the ability to add interactive elements like quizzes or polls. If your goal is to showcase your products or services, you may want a plugin to add product information or links to purchase pages directly in the video player.

Similarly, to create tutorials or educational content, you might want a plugin that supports closed captions or transcripts or that integrates with a learning management system. Some plugins even offer features like video analytics or split testing that help you measure the effectiveness of your videos and optimize them for better results.

2. Compatibility

Compatibility is great when combining or extending your WordPress’s ability with a plugin. Some plugins might work just perfectly, while others might trigger some issues that can later lead to a drawback in the mid-term where you may have difficulty changing into a different video management plugin. 

This compatibility may come into place with your other plugins, theme code or PHP version. So you need to make sure the plugin you will use is flexible and fits perfectly to align with your project. 

In addition, using incompatible plugins can slow down the website’s performance. To avoid such unsuitability the best way is to test your plugins before deciding to keep one on the site. The testing will immediately identify any potential issue and therefore you have the opportunity to select the best-suited plugin for your site. 

3. Ease of use

We all like easy-to-use utilities, so you must consider a video plugin that makes it effortless to run your video project. You don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out how to use the plugin, especially if you don’t have much technical knowledge.

An ideal plugin will let you manage the videos, such as uploading, enabling and disabling specific video options, providing a user-friendly interface, embed videos from a wide range of networks without hassle through many complicated steps or processes.

Choosing a user-friendly plugin will save you time and allow you to focus on creating great content rather than struggling with technical issues so that you can get the most out of your video content.

4. Features

Features are the tool to achieve your goals, so you must be decisive when considering your plugin’s features. For example, if you want to create a video gallery to showcase a collection of videos, you’ll need a plugin that offers gallery functionality.

Again for adding popups to your videos, you’ll need a plugin that supports this feature. Popups are a great way to encourage users to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a product, watching a relevant video, or suggesting reading another article on your site.

Displaying videos in a slider will require the plugin to provide that functionality. Sliders are great for displaying multiple videos in a visually appealing and interactive way. There are numerous other features, such as customizing video playback settings, adding captions or subtitles, or supporting different video formats you might want to consider while choosing your plugin.

5. Support and updates

You want to use a plugin that is well taken care of and hence receives frequent updates from the developers. This ensures that the plugin remains compatible with the latest WordPress versions and that any potential problems or errors are addressed quickly.

By looking at the latest update and compatibility test with the WordPress version for the plugin you can ensure that it’s well suited for your WordPress environment and secure as well.

A plugin that does not receive frequent updates may indicate the plugin developer is not actively supporting it, and no one to address any issues that may arise, leaving your website vulnerable.

Once you choose your plugin aligned with these criteria,, you can install it on the website and start your video management project from your WordPress.

Top WordPress Video Plugins You Can Try On Your WordPress Site

So now you know what you want to install as a video manager extension, here are our top picks you would love to have on your website. 

Read through the plugins and their features, advantages, and disadvantages and how much they will cost you. Hopefully, you will find the right plugin from this list for your site.

1. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a highly customizable and easy-to-use plugin for WordPress that provides various features to help you create engaging and professional-looking images and video galleries. 

It was first released in 2014 and has since become popular for WordPress users who want to create visually stunning galleries.

With its drag-and-drop gallery builder, you can quickly create beautiful and responsive galleries without coding skills. Envira Gallery also offers pre-designed templates, a variety of display options, social media integration, and much more to enhance your gallery’s appearance and functionality.

Pros:

• The plugin includes customizable lightbox popups, which can be used to showcase your images and videos in a sleek and modern way.
• You can add custom watermarks to your images to protect them from theft or unauthorized use.
• The plugin comes with social sharing buttons, which allow your viewers to share your galleries on various social media platforms easily.

Cons:

• The free version of the plugin has limited features and may not meet all of your needs.
• Some of the more advanced features are only available in the plugin’s premium version, which may require a subscription fee.
• The plugin may not integrate seamlessly with all WordPress themes and plugins, requiring additional customization.

Pricing:

This is a freemium plugin that you can download from the WordPress plugin repository. If you want to access premium features go for the basic plan that costs about $29 per year up to $299 per year classified into 3 different premium plans. 

The pricing justifies the functionalities available on the plugin and is still an affordable deal you can get for a video management plugin.

2. Video Gallery WordPress plugin

The Video Gallery is a WordPress plugin by Total-Soft. This plugin is user-friendly and responsive. It let people search for related topics and videos on platforms like youtube, Wistia, or other search engines.

You can customize the galleries with 9 different layouts, hover effects, animations, text colors, pagination, and more. It also supports YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, and MP4 videos, as well as allows you to add custom links for single videos.

If you’re looking for an efficient way to showcase video content on your WordPress website, a video gallery plugin is the perfect solution. 

This software tool empowers you to easily create and display video galleries, enabling you to organize your content and present it visually appealing and engagingly. 

Pros:

• Usually comes with a range of customization options, including different layouts, colors, and styles.
• May include features like video previews, light boxes, and autoplay options to enhance the user experience.
• Many video gallery plugins are optimized for performance, ensuring that your website loads quickly and smoothly.

Cons:

• Some video gallery plugins may require a paid license or subscription to access all features and support.
• Depending on the plugin, a learning curve may be involved in setting up and customizing your video galleries.
• If you have a lot of video content, your website may experience slower load times or performance issues.

Pricing:

This is a free plugin to use. If you want additional premium features, you can upgrade to the business plan, which ranges from $15 to $29. You can opt-in for the developer plan for more advanced features, which costs around $50.

3. All-in-One Video Gallery

This plugin allows you to quickly and easily add videos to your website as posts and create galleries optimized for search engines and easily searchable.

This custom video player can play files in MP4, WebM, and OGV formats. It also supports embedding videos from other sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Rumble, and Facebook. 

This is a feature-rich plugin that comes with a play/pause, timer, progress bar, quality switcher, speed control, volume button, fullscreen button, share buttons, an embed button, download button, subtitles control, autoplay, loop, muted, and preload options, and the ability to embed videos from other sites. In addition, this plugin supports GDPR compliance.

It offers a responsive front end to ensure your video gallery looks great on all devices, to provide a seamless viewing experience to your website, and visitors.

Pros:

• Easy to use with a drag-and-drop interface for creating and organizing video galleries.
• Comes with pre-designed templates for quick and easy customization.
• Includes features such as video previews, light boxes, and autoplay options to enhance the user experience.
• Optimized for performance, ensuring that your website loads quickly and smoothly.
• The plugin includes social sharing buttons, making it easy for viewers to share your videos on social media.
• You can track your video’s performance with the built-in video analytics feature.

Cons:

• Some advanced features require a paid license or subscription to access.
• May not be as flexible or customizable as other video gallery plugins.
• Limited support documentation was available.
• The plugin may not integrate seamlessly with all WordPress themes and plugins, requiring additional customization.

Pricing:

All in one video gallery is another freemium plugin you can try that comes with additional features, which would cost you $39 for the basic plan, $69 for the plus plan and $149 for the advanced plan comes with unlimited site access, including all features, and premium support.

4. WP Video Gallery

WP Vido Gallery is a cool plugin you can utilize to create and showcase video content with custom layouts, styles, colors, and customization options. 

This plugin makes it easy to stream videos on your WordPress website and customize them to your liking. You can connect your catalog, use your API key or URLs, and pick from different options to organize and customize your video gallery. 

You can also use CSS to customize the gallery further, although you can achieve this by adding CSS on the WordPress customizer.

Pros

• The plugin is designed to be responsive, ensuring that your videos look great on all devices, including desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones.
•  Supports multiple video sources, including YouTube, Vimeo, and self-hosted videos.
• The plugin allows you to create video playlists, which enables you to group and display your videos in a more organized manner.
•  SEO-friendly features, such as the ability to add video descriptions and tags to improve search engine optimization.

Cons 

• Premium plugin, 
• Not suitable for small websites.
• It can be slow when loading multiple videos.

Pricing:

The basic version of this plugin is available for free. However, you can get the premium bundles of features within the starter, developer, and ultimate plan that starts from €59 and goes up to €199.

5. FV Player

FV Player is a free video player for WordPress that is easy to use and has lots of features, like the ability to remember video position for both guest users and members, built-in video stats, API for custom video fields, AB looped playback for your visitors, improved playlists, and automated checking of video encoding for admins. It’s responsive on all devices.

It has many customization options such as changing the player’s colour scheme and style and adding personalized branding. With FV Player, you can create visually stunning video content that will captivate your audience.

Pros

• FV Player is a plugin that allows you to embed FLV or MP4 videos into your WordPress site easily. It works well on mobile devices too.
• Custom start and end screens are built into FV Player, so you can design your own screens to show before and after the video.
• FV Player doesn’t have expensive add-ons, as all advanced features are included in the standard license. This includes Google Analytics, Cue points, Native fullscreen, Keyboard shortcuts, Subtitles, Slow motion, Random seeking, and Retina ready.
• It supports Amazon S3, Cloudfront, and other CDNs, so you can easily use it with these services.

 Cons

• While the basic version of the plugin is free, some of the more advanced features are only available with the paid version.
• Although the plugin is designed to be user-friendly, it may take some time to learn how to use all of the customization options.
• Hosting self-hosted videos can require a lot of server resources, so it’s important to ensure that your hosting plan can handle the additional load.

Price

The plugin comes in a free basic version, but if you need more features, paid options are available. The paid version for one domain costs about $75 and is suitable for websites, blogs, or projects. 

The five domains paid version is for developers, groups, or organizations and costs around $195. If you need the plugin for 20 domains, which is ideal for large corporations, organizations, or web hosts, it will cost about $500.

6. YouTube Showcase

YouTube Showcase is a tool that helps you display YouTube videos on your website in a neat and organised way. It is easy to use and customisable. 

It also has features that allow you to change the size of thumbnails and enable WordPress comments on each video. There are two different ways to display the videos – a gallery page and a grid gallery page.

Pros:

• With its intuitive interface, you don’t need coding skills to use the plugin. You can effortlessly create video galleries and embed them onto your website quickly.
• Offering many customization options, you can choose from various gallery styles and layouts and even personalize the colors and fonts to match your website’s aesthetic.
• The plugin is optimized for cross-device functionality to work seamlessly on desktop computers, tablets, and mobile phones.
• The plugin includes SEO-friendly features, such as adding video descriptions and tags to improve search engine optimization.

Cons:

• The plugin doesn’t offer advanced video editing options, so you may need to edit your videos elsewhere before adding them to your website.
• Adding videos to your website can slow down the loading time of your pages, especially if the videos are large or hosted on a slow server.
• If you embed YouTube videos using this plugin, you won’t have complete control over the ads that appear in the videos.

Pricing:

The plugin has a free basic version that you can use, but there’s also a paid pro version that offers more features. For $99.99 a year, you’ll get features like Drag & Drop Ordering, custom video comments, Advanced Video Galleries, Video Statistics, and many more.

7. WP Video Lightbox

This plugin allows you to easily add videos to your WordPress site, which can be viewed in an overlay display when clicked. It supports videos from YouTube, Vimeo, iFrame, and more and is also compatible with iPhones and iPads. 

It has various options, such as allowing autoplay, adjusting the animation speed, and changing the opacity.

This plugin allows you to embed a YouTube video into a lightbox on your website, ensuring it is secure and private. You can use either a shortcode or HTML code to show the video, and it will automatically get the thumbnail for you. It also prevents suggested videos from being shown at the end of the video.

Pros

• The plugin is user-friendly and doesn’t require any coding skills to use. You can quickly and easily embed videos onto your website using the plugin.
• You can customize the look and feel of the lightbox to match your website’s design. 

This includes the option to choose different skins and styles for the lightbox.

• Easily create and embed video galleries on your website with the plugin’s user-friendly interface.
• Customize your gallery with multiple styles, layouts, colours, and fonts to match your website.
•  Enjoy seamless cross-device functionality on desktops, tablets, and mobiles.

Cons

• While the plugin offers some customization options, it doesn’t have as many features as some of its competitors.
• WP Video Lightbox doesn’t offer a free version, so you’ll need to pay to use it.
• Some users have reported compatibility issues with certain WordPress themes and plugins, although these are relatively rare.

Pricing: 

You can download this plugin from the WordPress repository for free.

8. Videopack

The Videopack plugin allows you to easily upload videos to your WordPress Media Library and create a player to embed, with various options to customize the appearance and functionality. 

This one lets you create video galleries, and if you have an optional FFMPEG installed, you can generate thumbnails and automatically select video resolutions. Additionally, you can purchase an add-on to add advertisements to your videos.

Pros:

• The plugin supports various video platforms, including YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion.
• The plugin generates custom thumbnails for your videos, allowing you to choose the best image to represent your video.
• The plugin is designed to be user-friendly, even for those without technical knowledge.
• The plugin generates SEO-friendly code that helps search engines to index your videos and improve your website’s search engine ranking.

Cons:

• It doesn’t offer a lot of video editing options, so you may need to edit your videos elsewhere before adding them to your website.
• Adding videos to your website can slow down the loading time of your pages, especially if the videos are large or hosted on a slow server.
• The Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator plugin is designed specifically for WordPress websites, so it may not be compatible with other website platforms.

Pricing:

The plugin is free to use, but if you want to add advertisements to your videos, you can do so with the Videopack Ads premium add-on. You can purchase this add-on on the Add-ons tab of the Videopack Settings page or on the Videopack website. It costs $5.99 per year, or if you want to use it for a lifetime, you can pay $24.99.

9. Easy Video Player

This plugin allows you to easily embed MP4 videos into your website, with responsive video for a better user experience on mobile devices and HTML5 video compatibility for all major browsers. 

You can customize the video player with classes and use the MediaElement player or the default WordPress video player. It offers autoplay, loop, muted options, and poster images. It is an AMP-compatible plugin. 

The plugin is simple to set up and configure, allowing you to embed videos quickly.

Pros

• The plugin includes a customizable video player that you can use to display your videos on your website. You can change the player’s colors, add a logo, and more.
• The video player is designed to be responsive, automatically adjusting to fit different screen sizes and device types.
• You can embed your videos on your website using various methods, including shortcodes, HTML, and JavaScript.
• The plugin includes built-in analytics that allows you to track how often your videos have been played and how long people have watched them.
• You can use the plugin to protect your videos from unauthorized access by setting up password protection or IP address restrictions.

Cons

• The plugin doesn’t offer a lot of video editing options, so you may need to edit your videos elsewhere before adding them to your website.
• The Easy Video Player video plugin is designed to work specifically with WordPress, so it may not be compatible with other website platforms.
• Adding videos to your website can slow down the loading time of your pages, especially if the videos are large or hosted on a slow server.

Price

The plugin is free, but there are additional add-ons available for the Easy Video Player plugin that can make it work even better on your website. 

One of these add-ons costs $29.99, and it will create a clean player with a media element template. With this add-on, the player will load without a control bar background, giving your website a sleeker look.

10. Wonder Video Embed

WonderPlugin Video Embed is a handy and user-friendly plugin for WordPress users, allowing them to quickly add videos to their posts, pages, and sidebar widgets. 

It supports YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, iFrame, and self-hosted MP4/WebM video formats. It is compatible with mobile devices, tablets, and all major web browsers such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, and Edge. 

Additional features include a lightbox popup, auto lightbox popup on page load, and auto close video popup when the video ends, making it suitable for use with the Gutenberg editor.

Pros: 

• WonderPlugin Video Embed is easy to use and set up, making it perfect for anyone who wants to quickly and easily embed videos into their WordPress site. 
• You can embed videos in posts and pages, and it supports both self-hosted and externally hosted videos. 
• It supports popular video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion, so you can easily embed videos from any of them. 
• You can customize the look and feel of your embedded videos with custom colors, sizes, and other settings. 
• It is mobile-friendly and responsive, so it looks great on any device. 
• The plugin is regularly updated with bug fixes and new features, so you can always stay updated with the latest version. 

Cons:

• There is no free version of the plugin, and the cost of the plugin can be a barrier for some users. 
• It does not support live-streaming videos. 
• It does not have an analytics feature, so you cannot track the performance of your embedded videos.
• It does not support video playback on mobile devices.
• It does not offer a wide range of customization options.

Pricing:

The plugin is free, but you can upgrade to the pro version of Wonder Lightbox. This version comes in three options: Standard, Multiple, and Unlimited. The Standard version costs $49, the Multiple version costs $79, and the Unlimited version costs $149. When you upgrade to any of these versions, the watermark will be removed, and all limitations will be lifted. You’ll also receive support and updates for one year. 

The number of websites you can use the plugin on varies depending on your chosen version. The Standard version is limited to one website, the Multiple version can be used on up to five websites, and the Unlimited version can be used on as many websites as you want.

Additionally, there’s a Wonder Mega Bundle that includes all 10 premium Wonder Plugins: Wonder 3D Carousel, Wonder Audio Player, Wonder Carousel, Wonder Gallery, Wonder Grid Gallery, Wonder Lightbox, Wonder Popup, Wonder Slider, Wonder Tabs, and Wonder WooCommerce Quick View. This bundle costs $99 for the Standard version, $159 for the Multiple version, and $299 for the Unlimited version.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed a variety of excellent WordPress video plugins available to help you display videos on your website. Whether you’re looking for a lightweight plugin with basic functionality or a feature-rich plugin with a wide range of customization options, there’s sure to be a plugin that meets your needs. 

Before making a decision, consider the pros and cons of each plugin and evaluate which features are most important for your specific use case. With the right video plugin, you can enhance your website with engaging and informative video content that will keep your visitors returning for more.

I hope that this information has proven useful to you. Thank you for taking the time to read and consider it.

Additional posts you can read:

1. How to Speed Up a WordPress Website Running Ezoic Ads
2. 5 Best WordPress Speed Optimization Services You Can Hire
3. Top 10 Best Typography WordPress Themes

LCP is essential to the user experience. People don’t like to wait for a page to start loading or see a blank page before the main contents load when they could immediately get a faster experience elsewhere.

Page performance analysis tools tell your LCP metrics per page, and as a website owner, you should be concerned with keeping the LCP below 2.5 seconds to load your main content as fast as possible. 

In our previous article, we discussed good and bad LCP, reasons that can harm your page LCP, and typical methods to reduce your LCP timing. Today, let’s talk about the featured image, its impact on LCP for your post-type pages, and ways to fix it because they usually receive the most traffic.

Impact of the Featured image in LCP

The featured image is loaded above the fold of your page, which means the browser has to load the image file, and if the file is large in size or your server response time is not fast enough, your page may suffer an LCP issue. 

The above-the-fold image asset can be a hero image, a banner, or a carousel. Google considers <img> or <image> element inside an <svg> element for the Largest Contentful Paint. Hence you must optimize these images for a better LCP.

A size of 100+kb image above the fold usually requires a couple of milliseconds and often appears to be the primary reason for LCP. When you need your LCP metrics to remain under 2.5 seconds, every millisecond count, you should consider optimizing it.

Here is an example of a site with a featured image above the fold. The featured image file is the source of LCP, but because all the assets are well optimized and served via CDN, the pages are able to get a much lesser LCP 1113ms than the critical point.

So, if the featured image is causing LCP, does removing it help?

Removing the featured image improves the LCP metric by reducing the couple of milliseconds required to render the image file. If your featured image was heavy in size, say > 500kb, you should get a decent upgrade in terms of LCP after removing it from above the fold. 

Then when it comes to mobile devices, where the network and compilation are usually slower, it becomes even more difficult to tackle LCP issues with an image of large-size loading in the first print. 

It’s not that after removing the featured image, your site will eliminate the LCP issues. The texts will cover the space and featured image used to cover, and you will still need to optimize your fonts. However, it’s easier to serve optimized fonts than a featured image in terms of performance. 

A featured image makes your page look better and adds a nice touch for the visitor to get an idea of what they will find on the page. But when you have to balance performance and design, you could opt for a solution that maintains both conditions. 

1. Drop the featured image from above the fold.
2. Have the featured image on your page, but below the fold.

Shifting your featured image below a few paragraphs (I usually add it below the 2nd paragraph) has helped many sites we have worked on. It maintains the visual image that describes the page and allows the font to load as the largest contentful paint. Then we preload the most important fonts for the browsers to load them as soon as possible.

Is there a way we can keep the featured image for desktop devices and remove it on mobile?

Yes, keeping the featured image above the fold on desktop (if LCP is not an issue on desktop) and removing or shiting it below the fold on mobile can be an excellent solution to tackle your site’s LCP issue. 

This will require a simple CSS selector to be used: 

@media (max-width: 480px){ .entry-content img {
         display: none;
     }
}

The @media (max-width: 480px) will trigger for all devices with screen width =< 480px, and then it will select the featured image with .entry-content img and set the display rule to null.

You can try to shift the featured image with the same selector and replace the display:none with the right CSS code to display it below a couple of paragraphs to ensure it appears below the fold.

Note: here, we are discussing the impact of featured images on LCP, so by no means this piece of content intended to say that featured images are responsible for LCP issues on your site. There are many other reasons why a page is suffering from LCP. I have added a couple of other reasons that help LCP to rise. 

Here is a test report for a website where we have not changed anything else but dropped the featured image below 3rd paragraph, and that resolved the LCP issues it had by a couple of milliseconds.

Additional reasons for poor LCP

Apart from the featured images on most pages, there are other things that are responsible for LCP. Anything that slows down the page rendering process could be the reason for the LCP issue on your pages. 

These elements usually take a lot of specs, unoptimized assets, assets with loading delays, assets with 3rd party connections, advertisements, lots of unoptimized javascript on the head section, etc. We can’t forget about the core server’s response time.

1. Slow Server Response Times

Server response time is a critical factor of LCP. If your server is not fast enough, it might fail to serve above-the-fold assets in under 2.5 seconds. Hence while considering your website host, it’s important to avoid hosts that are not reliable and fast enough.

Bad server back-end infrastructure, unoptimized databases, and longer time to resolve API requests are often the reasons for slow server response time. Always go for a performance-optimized host if you want your website to be fast, web vital compatible, and favorites of search engines with good quality content.

2. Render blocking Javascript and CSS

Javascript and CSS help improve your site design and functionality, but it’s important to optimize them for your host to serve them per request in a way that does not prevent the loading of primary content.

Loading too many Js and CSS codes at the head might increase render-blocking issues. Render blocking is directly proportional to page LCP; hence, you should reduce render blocking as much as possible without breaking your site’s functionality.

3. Slow Resource Load Times

If you have resources loading above the fold that are large in file size, have dense visual elements, are not optimized, videos & gif files, or have lots of text contents, it will affect the page LCP. Consider optimizing those assets or removing/reducing them from the top of your page.

4. Client-side Rendering

Client-side rendering can be another reason for LCP issues. Client-side rendering involves the browser collecting and loading javascript before rendering primary content on the page. If the process is complex and device hardware unable to perform memory management, your webpage might struggle on people’s browsers, increasing the chance of LCP.

So consider optimizing or avoiding client-side rendering if possible.

Introducing a new case study: A fully outsourced AI content + expired domain + Ezoic content site portfolio.

I have a portfolio of sites that had been mostly neglected, but I have decided to put on an effort to rebuild them. Most of these sites are built on expired domains from LightningRank.com and content created using GPT-3 tools, then significantly human-edited, similar to how RocketContent.ai produces content.

I have hired a manager, given them access to tools, and had them build out procedures that I reviewed. This has been going now for about 6 months and its time to start providing a monthly income report.

Overall I am really happy with the progress of the sites, the content quality being useful, and the cost/article we are currently producing. 

My plan is that each month we are going to share the traffic, revenue, expenses and overall PnL for a portfolio income.

Why Expired Domains? The power of backlinks in the eyes of google is undeniable. Building relevant sites on expired domains continue to be a SEO “hack” we see work.

Why AI Content? AI content with a human editor to spot-check and fact-check produces solid quality content that is useful at unbeatable prices.

Why EZoic? Ezoic is the simplest way to monetize sites successfully. It Beats Adsense all day! When it makes sense, some sites have affiliate monetization, but the focus is on traffic and display ads. 

Why Fully Managed? In this case study, I have a manager assigned to the portfolio managing everything! From the sites to the writers to ezoic. 

The aim is marginally profitable solid growth.  

Everything below is prepared by the manager (who is awesome!). Finding management to run a portion of the business has always been the key to success for my businesses whether it is affiliate or FBA.

Here’s how our portfolio of AI-driven content has performed in October 2022 with Ezoic. 

1. Traffic & Earning Overview (Ezoic)

Our portfolio sites get the most traffic from search engines, and Google is the primary source.

After the latest updates from Google, we noticed positive and negative impacts on the AI content sites. While some sites significantly improved their SERP rankings, others lost a substantial portion of top-ranking keywords, creating an unrelaxed fluctuation in the overall traffic for the portfolio. 

The overall portfolio traffic in October lost 9.62% in total visits (75,570 compared to 83,610 in September 2022) and 9.27% in terms of page views (88,413 vs. 97,448 in September 2022).

Regarding revenue, the portfolio sites show similar statistics to traffic, a 10.90% drop compared to the previous month (September 2022) and a tiny drop in ePMV of 1.42%. It’s pretty obvious not to maintain a higher total revenue while there’s a 14,000 fewer page views gap than the previous month.

While the October traffic and revenue outcome of the portfolio is not successive to September, we have a much better result for an entirely AI-driven portfolio than the same month of the last year.

The portfolio growth data (Oct 2022 vs. Oct 2021): 

1. Total Visits (+147.70%)
2. Pageviews (+141.43%)
3. Revenue (+182.53%) 
4. ePMV(+14.06%)

2. Traffic Overview By Site

Traffic data per site on the portfolio has had frequent ups and downs following the Google algorithm updates in the last couple of months. Some of the major sites’ traffic dropped a little bit, while other new sites have evolved into a major contributor to the portfolio’s overall traffic, and some other sites tanked.

Here are October traffic data from a couple of prominent sites in the portfolio: (compared to September 2022) 

The portfolio obtained a total of 75,570 traffic in the month of October across all sites, 36,244 being the maximum and 164 being minimum traffic for a site. We found an overall change of -8,040 visits to the previous month and -9,035 that of page views.

The maximum pageview gained by an AI content site in Oct was 41,515, and 174 was the minimum. That would be average traffic of 5894 across all sites in the portfolio publishing AI content.

3. Revenue Data Per Site

The portfolio’s revenue stats are directly proportional to October’s visits and page view stats. The total revenue for the portfolio was $738.51 in Oct 2022, with $467.32 as the highest revenue for a site with an average ePMV of $7.19 compared to $7.31 of the previous month (September) across all sites. 

The maximum ePMV during the month was $21.03 and registered the minimum ePMV of $1.45 for a site with the least page views.

The changes in terms of ePMV and Revenue are -1.69% and -9.46% from the previous month (September), respectively. 

4. Expense

Running a website portfolio with multiple sites publishing regular content can be quite expensive. Having a functional, well-managed AI content machine was the plan to reduce the cost of content creation. 

To produce content with an AI copywriter tool, we have a team of human writers who follows specific guideline, take care of the content creation, does fact check for AI-generated texts, and does the optimization to ensure output quality and authenticity. 

So we have a combined monthly expense of the editorial team and AI copywriter tool (our primary AI copywriter is Jasper.ai), which generates texts for a fixed price per word.

Here’s the portfolio October total expanse compared to revenue generated with Ezoic Ad revenue (excluding other revenue sources) looks like:

Key data:

1. Total expanses: $652.00
2. Total Revenue: $740.73
3. Profit (with Ezoic revenue): $88.73 
4. % of profit Ezoic revenue brings in: 13.61% 

5. Changes & Focus:

The unpredictability of website performance in terms of traffic and revenue has always been a part of content-based websites, especially those that get the most part of their traffic from search engines. 

To publish content that is written with AI support and still do well in Google SERP, we need to put great effort into content quality and optimization. That being one of the primary focuses, we also need to ensure delivering an optimized experience to the reader. 

Apart from maintaining the content quality, our objectives for the sites in this portfolio are, 

1. Delivering simplicity: a simple and easy-to-understand approach to delivering information people are looking for and letting them access something without having to deal with complex elements on the site.
2. Visual Hierarchy: we attempt to organize the website elements so that the visitors naturally see the most important elements first.
3. Navigability: All the sites have navigations that are well organized, allowing visitors to have an idea about the clusters quickly and letting people find what they are looking for.
4. User-centricity: we believe in the idea and build & update the websites in the portfolio to convey smoother usability and experience to the users. After all, it is the users who will experience the website and explore its contents.
5. Accessibility: we try our best to reduce anything that can prevent users from accessing the website and can break the functionality.
6. Responsivity: the sites are 100% responsive to be compatible with many different devices our visitors use. 
7. Maintain a Good site health score: ensuring the site does not have minor issues such as abuse of headings, metadata, or links is vital because they can be decisive when you are pushing for the SERP position and want your pages to be 100% ready to compete with a quality piece of content. If done right, it’s quite possible with AI copywriting tools.
8. Site speed and web vitals: site speed and maintaining good web vitals is one of our primary objectives. Our internal data states that with speed upgrade, portfolio sites led to a much better crawling experience for the Google bot and resulted in ~ 6x daily crawling requests compared to before. 

Not only that, fast-loading sites improve the browsing experience and provide us peace of mind after having passed web vitals matrices on the google search console. We also improved our visitor’s time on the page and page depth on the site with the speed upgrade, thanks to Ezoic’s CDN and performance tool (LEAP).

1. The addition of a new site to the portfolio

With a plan of smoothly running currently available sites on the portfolio, we look forward to adding potential sites to grow within our strategy. Having a functional setup to publish regular AI content and a plan to optimize them makes bringing new sites to the portfolio easier. 

Once a new site arrives, we scale the site’s current traffic, design, performance, and other elements to come up with a plan that can lift up the overall quality and experience. Once the site is ready – we strategically prepare a content plan to execute in the upcoming months. 

That being said, not every site we added to our portfolio has had a great time and better output. Some sites tanked and lost a significant portion of the traffic – but most of those threats arrived after the recent Google updates. It brings in the debate of Google penalizing AI content sites which does not hold TRUE for other AI content sites in the portfolio. 

Sites that lost a major portion of traffic lately were the sites ranked well for previously created content. It is safe to say those were not the best quality documents available on the internet for a particular search query. We are still putting our effort into better content updates to see and test how those pages perform as we advance. 

Number of sites added to the portfolio in October: 2

2. Nameserver connection for Ezoic

Ezoic recommends the nameserver connection method to integrate your site with the platform for better site performance and revenue boost. Earlier on, we had many sites integrated with the Ezoic plugin now all of them switched to the nameserver method. 

With the nameserver connection, the site performance has improved a lot. Almost all sites in the portfolio are passing or close to passing web vitals… although we needed to bring some visual and technological changes to the site. 

The improvement in performance and loading of the primary page elements faster helps the ads load faster. Pages and ads that load faster can improve your ad revenue by a decent margin and definitely help our sites to increase Ezoic ad revenue.

3. Seasonal decline & monitor performance

Seasonal interest and demand for products and services affects sites and is a perfectly natural, annoyingly unavoidable aspect of websites, even in any business. Quite obviously, our sites in the portfolio aren’t independent of seasonality. 

There are unpredictable ups and down in terms of traffic for the sites. Having to maintain lots of sites in the portfolio and smoothly take care of other aspects of the sites, it becomes quite challenging to keep a close eye on each site individually. 

Semrush and Ahrefs help us by providing the traffic overview and keywords found in organic searches for each site. It gives us an idea of the ongoing traffic state of a site compared to what could be a scenario for the site in the coming months based on the trajectory of organic keywords. 

In addition, we can analyze the organic keywords situation, and based on their latest form; we can decide to improve the content if required. 

Conclusion: It is fun to manage multiple sites and have a proper plan to run them all together while still making some decent profit with provisions to increase revenue in the future. This could easily be a project that consumes most of our time, but a well-designed plan and ready-to-use tools + the right people in the right place, make it much easier to manage the portfolio.

This income report serise is aimed at sharing our growth and the fundamentals that helped us reach here, minor details that can help you build your AI-driven website’s portfolio at a significantly lower cost.

We can’t discuss fixing web vitals without discussing one key factor called LCP, the Largest Contentful Paint. LCP is essential to the user experience. People typically don’t like to wait for a page to start loading when they could immediately get a faster experience elsewhere. 

LCP tells you how long it takes to load the main contents of your page and become readable to the users. The faster the LCP is, the better-performance impression a user gets on your website. 

The largest Contentful Paint is considered one of the main factors on the web vital and starting to play a vital role in your page rank on the SERPs. To be in favor of Google and have pages that deliver a better experience for the visitors, it’s important to remain on top of your LCP.

Poor LCP can be one of the reasons for higher bounce rates, ranking issues, or even lower conversion rates.

What is a Good Or Bad LCP?

According to Google, the main content of a page should load within 2.5 seconds when a user tries to visit a page, which refers to having a good LCP. If the main content takes more than 5 seconds, people are likely to exit from your site and be considered poor LCP. 

Usually, when a page can maintain a good LCP (main content load time under 2.5 seconds) for 75% of the time, the performance is considered good in Google Search Console.

This image explains how LCP ratings are categorized. 

What can cause poor LCP and how to detect it?

There’s not a definite element that is responsible for LCP. Anything that slows down the page rendering process could be the reason for the LCP issue on your pages. Usually, the elements that take up a lot of space, media players, unoptimized images, social media buttons with 3rd party connections, and newsletter sign-up forms can increase your page’s load time.

If we dive deeper to find the primary reasons for LCP, they can be classified this way.

1. Slow Server Response Times

Regardless of how much you try to optimize your website, if you have a slow server, its response time will slow down your page loading matrices. This will definitely result in a poor LCP record.

Bad server back-end infrastructure, unoptimized databases, and longer time to resolve API requests are often the reasons for slow server response time. 

So the first step towards improving your LCP records is to host your website on a fast web server. 

2. Slow Resource Load Times

Resources that are large in file size or have a dense visual impact will take longer to load. Unoptimized images, GIF files, videos, and many text content above the fold will affect your LCP record. 

The best way to take care of your LCP is to compress file size, ensure loading only necessary elements above the fold, and avoid video or large image files in the first print.

3. Render blocking Javascript and CSS

CSS and Javascript play a significant role in how they are being served. Adding javascript and CSS to make a fancy-looking web page will eventually cost your page performance. 

It’s true that without CSS and javascript codes, we can’t add dynamic, interactive, and attractive elements to our websites. But the timing of execution for these files should be taken care of. If you load them in head and they take longer execution time, it will block other website assets from loading. 

Reducing render-blocking assets can significantly boost your pages in terms of LCP. Still, you must remember while fixing render-blocking, you are not shifting important libraries and javascript & CSS codes to the footer. This might end up with a broken web page or an accessibility issue.

4. Client-side Rendering

Rendering web pages in the browser with JavaScript is a popular web development method. Client-side rendering can be one of the main reasons for LCP issues if your pages use this method. 

Client-side rendering involves the browser collecting and loading javascript before rendering primary content on the page. The webpage might struggle to pass LCP matrices depending on the rendering time and complexity.

So when you are concerned about your LCP and have client-side rendering on your site, consider optimizing or avoiding client-side rendering if possible. 

How to discover LCP elements on your page?

To fix LCP issues, you need to know what your LCP is. I have ordered the steps we follow to analyze the LCP of a web page and have the plan to take necessary action to fix it.

1. Use Google Search Console

A good way to confirm your page has LCP issues is by checking Google Search Console’s web vital section. The web vital section displays URL’s performance status collected across real users’ devices. You will have a unique report for desktop and mobile versions. 

When the URLs are good, your site LCP has to be good. But when they are marked as “need improvement” or “poor,” you might need to check which web vital metrics are actually flailing & need rechecking.

2. Use page speed insight

Page speed insight is a dedicated tool to instantly check the web vitals of a page over the latest 28-day collection period and via live test. When the origin data in page speed insight has an LCP of less than 2.5 seconds means it’s in a safe range.

It’s the more than 2.5 sec LCP when you should be concerned and try to fix it. The instant test of Page Speed Insight should help you identify elements that are responsible for LCP.

Steps – 

1. Go to page speed insight
2. Perform a test on your page.
3. Scroll down to the “Diagnose performance issues” section.
4. Then set the “Show audits relevant to” to LCP.
5. You will be displayed the opportunity to improve LCP and diagnostics.

3. Use Ezoic’s Browser Extension

Another easy way to inspect your LCP elements is via the browser extension by Ezoic. Usually, this extension is useful for creating ad and video placeholders on your pages. You can adjust those placeholders and test different configurations to boost Ezoic revenue.

There is another section called LEAP where you can perform performance-related alerts, debug CDN on a page, analyze the LCP and highlight LCP elements. After analyzing a page, make sure to toggle the “Highlight LCP element” for the plugin to highlight the LCP element in yellow.

4. Test Your Page On Web Page Test

Webpagetest.org is a page performance testing tool that provides in-depth insights. When you scan a page for web vitals, this tool will give you the scores and elements responsible for LCP. 

This is a handy tool to inspect layout shifting issues as well; you can see which element is responsible for the layout shifts on your pages, making it easier for you to fix it. 

The web Page Test report will highlight the LCP elements with green and provide the timing.

Once you are aware of the reasons for LCP, you can proceed to optimize the LCP content to fix LCP issues on your page if any. Here are a couple of tips on fixing LCP issues.

Few Tips To Fix LCP Issues On Your Page:

1. Optimize your images: Make sure your images are lightweight while the quality is intact. I prefer to keep images between 50 – 100 Kb whenever possible, and it’s quite achievable if you are not running a photography website, portfolio website, or any sites where images are a priority. 

2. Preload your logo: Preloading the logo does not add much to performance, but you would want to load your site logo as soon as possible. This usually gives a 2-5% of boost to LCP timing when done right.

3. Avoid using too many fonts: Fonts make a site attractive but loading too many font files will increase the asset load chain and may be responsible for the late printing of texts on a web page. 

4. Localize and preload above-the-fold fonts: Although google fonts are fast, my favorite strategy that seems to work every time is localizing above-the-fold fonts and preloading them. While preloading, you need to be sure that these font files are not too heavy. In addition, your web server’s speed needs to be fast for localized font files to be served faster.

5. Optimize Javascripts: To optimize your JavaScripts remove unused codes, make sure the code is up to date and compatible with modern browsers, use modern JavaScript libraries and try reducing payloads. A caching plugin with javascript management options makes the job easier for you.

6. Optimize CSS codes: Compressing CSS files and implementing critical CSS often solve render-blocking issues related to CSS. Removing unused CSS files from your WordPress site can help scale down the LCP metric.

Relevant posts:

1. Case Study – Article to Video by Ezoic and Its Impact  
2. Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator Price Review and Test
3. 5 Best WordPress Speed Optimization Services You Can Hire

We want our site to be flawless to avoid penalties or compatibility issues with search engines. Rectifying technical SEOs, Removing possible accessibility issues, and following best practices of web development are tiny details that can decide your site’s performance on search engines.

To secure these criteria, the basic step is to identify the issues on your page. While we usually lean towards great tools like Ahref and Semrush to scan for page-related issues, one quicker and more efficient way to do this is to perform lighthouse scans via your web browser.

Lighthouse, previously known as the “Audits tool,” is a tool to identify and fix common problems that affect your site’s performance, accessibility, and user experience.

These are the simple steps to run a lighthouse scan on pages across your site:

• Open an incognito browser window and click on the three dots in the top right corner.
• Open your website page where you want to carry out the test. 
• From there, navigate to More tools > Developer tools.

• Next, select the lighthouse tab on your Dev toolbar. (click on the drop-down icon if Lighthouse is not listed among the visible tabs)
• Under the “generate lighthouse report” section, set the Mode to “Navigation,” select your preferred device type for testing, and check Performance, Accessibility, Best practices, and SEO under Categories.

• Once done, click on Analyze page load (the test should take a couple of seconds based on your site speed and asset count)
• When the test is complete, Lighthouse will rate your page per category and display technical faults, if there are any, similar to this example.

• Lighthouse reports are great and let you find critical issues on your pages that you might have never thought existed. I encounter many silly mistakes on various page tests, and fixing those issues has been helpful to those sites (personal sites).
• Moving forward, you can switch the available reports to find individual flows in each category. 

Once you know where the issue is, it becomes easier to resolve it yourself or hire someone to fix it. In addition, performing a lighthouse test takes just a couple of minutes, which can be an essential step towards improving your site to be more favorable to search engines. 

You will receive some recommendations on where to start, and getting these small details resolved will definitely boost the site’s overall impression for real users and search engines.

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