Embedding YouTube Videos

New to YouTube? Learn about getting started with video storage.

To place a YouTube video in the main region of a page or a story, follow the steps below. You can also place a video in the right column of a page by creating a "YouTube Widget."

Before You Begin: Video Requirements

Videos must include closed captions in order to be accessible. You can use YouTube's auto-generate function, but you must manually review them as they are only about 95% accurate and often incorrectly display proper nouns. You can also enlist the help of a captioning service to caption your videos for you.

Due to YouTube terms of service, all videos on our Cascade websites must be designated "not made for kids" (general audience) in YouTube Studio. Our recommendation is to only embed videos from an official W&M channel to help ensure this practice is followed.

Right click a YouTube video and select "Stats for nerds" to get a YouTube Video ID.

Step 1: Get the YouTube Video ID

Browse to the video on YouTube
Right-click within the video
Select "Stats for nerds"
In the screen that appears, your Video ID is the short string of letters, numbers, and/or symbols on the first line.

Step 2: Choose a video player size - "small," "medium" or "large"

small: same size as the YouTube Widget
medium: just fits in the page content area when the right column is displayed
large: just fits in the page content area when the right column is not displayed

Step 3: Edit the page where you want to add the video

Within the page content there are 4 video placement options.

Left-aligned, text does not wrap around the video- Type the following directly in the Cascade content editor, substituting "size" with your choice from step 2 and "video-id" with the string of characters from step 1:

Centered, text does not wrap around the video- Type the following directly in the Cascade content editor, substituting "size" with your choice from step 2 and "video-id" with the string of characters from step 1:

Left-aligned, text wraps around the video- Type the following directly in the Cascade content editor, substituting "size" with your choice from step 2 and "video-id" with the string of characters from step 1:

Right-aligned, text wraps around the video- Type the following directly in the Cascade content editor, substituting "size" with your choice from step 2 and "video-id" with the string of characters from step 1:

The vertical bar you see in front of video-id is often called a "pipe" and is located above the enter key on most keyboards. On some keyboards it looks like 2 vertical dashes.

Having trouble?

If your embedded YouTube video is not functioning properly on your page, you could be experiencing one of the following issues:

You're not seeing a preview of your embed when you submit your page. Instead you see the curly bracket snippet with a hyperlinked video ID.
- There should not be any hyperlinked text within your brackets. This can sometimes happen if you copy and paste the video ID from within a URL that is hyperlinked.
You run into other problems, like the span tag getting inserted when pasting in the video ID.

Things to try if you see the curly bracket snippet:

Highlight the hyperlinked text and select theicon.
Highlight the entire curly bracket snippet and select "clear formatting" from the Format dropdown.