How to create a video sitemap in WordPress

Step by step

1. Switch it on

1. Open Hydrogen SEO → Sitemap.
2. In Sitemap Status, switch on Video Sitemap. A panel appears with Include, Found and Advanced.
3. Under Include, tick the post types to scan. Posts and Pages are selected by default.
4. Click Save Changes in the top bar.

Turning it on starts a background scan of existing content, so you do not have to open and re-save each post.

2. Let the scan finish

Found shows progress while the scan runs, then a count such as "38 posts with videos". The scan runs through WP-Cron, and it moves faster while the Sitemap screen is open. On a large site, leave the tab open for a few minutes. Rescan starts it again, which is useful after a bulk import.

3. Check what was detected

The scanner recognises YouTube (watch, short, embed, Shorts and live URLs), Vimeo, Dailymotion, TED, VideoPress, Wistia and self-hosted files such as mp4 and webm. It looks in post content for iframes, embed and video blocks, [video] and [embed] shortcodes and a video URL on a line of its own. It also reads the stored data of several page builders. A plain text link to a video inside a sentence is not counted, because it is a link and not an embedded player.

4. Add videos stored in custom fields

If your theme keeps the video URL in a custom field, for example a field called featured_video, open Advanced and list the meta keys under Custom fields, one per line. Save, and the background scan runs again with those fields included. This is the usual fix when a theme shows a video at the top of a post but the sitemap does not list it.

5. Open the sitemap and read an entry

Visit https://example.com/video-sitemap.xml. Larger sites get further pages at /video-sitemap2.xml and so on. Each video carries thumbnail_loc, title, description and a player_loc or content_loc, which are the four things Google requires. Where the video provider supplies nothing, the plugin falls back to the post title, excerpt, featured image and post date. An entry that still lacks a required value is left out so the file never contains an invalid video.

6. Correct a video's details

Titles and thumbnails come from the provider. To override them for one video, add VideoObject schema in the post's SEO Settings sheet: its values take priority over the detected ones. For YouTube, an optional YouTube API key under Advanced adds the description, duration, upload date and view count. Without a key, YouTube videos are still listed using the provider's public embed data.

7. Submit through the index

The video sitemap is listed in your sitemap index automatically. If /sitemap.xml is already in Search Console, nothing more is needed. After Google processes it, the Video pages report in Search Console shows which pages have an indexed video and why others do not.

Why a video is not listed

• The post or its post type is noindex, password-protected, or has a canonical pointing to another page.
• Exclude from video sitemap is switched on in the post's Robots Meta section.
• The post type is not ticked under Include.
• The video is a text link, or is added by a script the scanner cannot see. Put the URL in a custom field and list that field.
• The post has not been saved since the video was added and the background scan has not reached it. Saving a published post rescans it.

What a video sitemap cannot do

Google indexes a video for a page when the video is the main content of that page, in its own words. A blog article with a small clip halfway down may never get a video result however complete its sitemap entry is. A sitemap also does not speed up a slow embed. If video embeds hurt your loading times, lazy-load the player or use a thumbnail that loads the video on click, as covered in improve Core Web Vitals.