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Embedding is very common terminology in the website world. In layman's terms it basically means that you are inserting content from another website (or another source) into your web page.

Probably the most common form of embedding is videos. YouTube and Vimeo are popular sites where you can upload your videos on their servers for people to see on their sites. If you want to show that same video on your site, you can copy the "embed code" and paste it into your webpage*.

When you do this, your web page will load with all the content that is on your server, and it will also insert the "embedded" content in your page - making it look seamless with your site (depending on the embedding properties/etc.).

It is important to note that the embedded content is still on the server that you are embedding from. So, lets say you have a video on YouTube that you have embedded onto a page of your site. If YouTube is down for some reason, than your webpage will still show up, but your video won't since your webpage is still getting the video from YouTube.

What are the Advantages of Embedding?

Embedding has a lot of advantages.

Easier Load on Your Server

First and foremost, it takes a lot of the resource requirements away from your server - this is especially the case with videos. Unless you have a high powered Private Server, you are likely using a Shared Hosting Account which isn't really designed for hosting and playing a lot of videos natively (you will likely have buffering issues/etc.). However, if you are embedding your video from YouTube, your video is hosted on YouTube's powerful servers that are designed for video hosting and your videos will play much smoother. You also get the added SEO benefits of having your videos on YouTube.

Features can be added to your site without custom coding

Embedding can also help you expand the features of your current site without the extra expense of custom coding/etc. For example, perhaps you want a fully featured community/forum on your site (like this one). Instead of having a developer build it from scratch (this can cost a lot of money), you could create an account for a service that already built a fully featured platform, use their embed tools, and embed that feature into your existing site! This could save a ton of time and money!

You can embed almost anything into a page of your site: images, video, forms, features, etc.!

*When you paste the embed code into your site, you need to make sure you are pasting it inside the "source" code not just an html editor - that way the browser will read it as code, and not just a bunch of text!