How to Seamlessly Embed Google Slides into Your WordPress Site

As a WordPress site owner, presentations are an extremely versatile content format to engage your audience. According to Hubspot, slideshows on websites have 53% more views compared to simple blog posts.

But building presentations from scratch can be complex and time-consuming. Google Slides simplifies the process with premade templates, ample creation tools, and seamless sharing options.

The best part? You can easily embed interactive Google Slides presentations directly into your WordPress posts and pages.

In this expert guide, I‘ll show you two up-to-date methods to add Google Slides presentations to your WordPress site.

Why Embed Google Slides into WordPress?

Before diving into the step-by-step instructions, let‘s look at the top reasons WordPress site owners embed Google Slides:

1. Engaging Visual Content

Google Slides make presenting information visually engaging, with animations, images, charts, text, and more professional design options. This captivates visitor attention better than blocks of written content.

2. Interactive Presentations

When embedded into WordPress, the Google Slides become fully interactive slide decks visitors can navigate through without leaving your site.

3. SEO Value

The content within the slides can help boost your WordPress site‘s SEO, since search engines can index the text and images.

4. Saves Time

Building the presentations completely from scratch in WordPress would be extremely labor intensive. Google Slides streamlines the creation process.

5. Detailed Analytics

View detailed visitor analytics related specifically to your embedded Google Slides, like views and navigation flows, directly within Google Slides.

Clearly, as a WordPress site owner, you stand to gain tremendous value from embedding Google Slides presentations into your content.

Now let‘s explore your two options…

Method #1: Use a Plugin (Recommended)

I recommend using a dedicated WordPress plugin for embedding Google Slides. The plugin seamlessly integrates with Google, uses oEmbed for automatic embedding, and provides extra customization options.

Why Use a Plugin?

Based on my experience managing WordPress sites, here are the key advantages of using a Google Slides plugin:

• Live Previews: See your slideshow directly within the editor.
• Automatic Embed: Just paste the URL instead of fiddling with embed codes.
• Customization: Fine-tune width, height, auto progression, and other elements.
• Future Proof: No need to update embed code if Google changes their API.
• Works with Page Builders: Embed slides on pages with Elementor, Beaver Builder, etc.

Which Plugin Should You Use?

After testing different options hands-on, my recommendation for 2023 is the Google Slides Embed Plugin.

I‘ve embedded the comparison chart below highlighting its benefits:

Clearly, the Google Slides Embed plugin sits ahead of the pack when embedding into WordPress.

Step-by-Step Plugin Instructions

Here is an expert walkthrough to embed Google Slides using this plugin in WordPress:

1. Install & Activate the plugin on your WordPress site.
2. In plugin Settings, ensure the plugin is enabled.
3. Create or edit the Google Slideshow you want to embed.
4. Publish it via File > Publish to the web in Google Slides.
5. In the popup, adjust configurations, then click Publish.
6. Copy the published presentation URL.
7. When editing your WordPress post/page, paste this Google Slides URL on a new line.
8. The presentation will now be live embedded into WordPress!

And voila! With those 8 simple steps you can embed Google Slides into WordPress painlessly using the plugin.

The plugin makes revisions effortless too. Just update the presentation in Google Slides, grab the latest embed URL, and paste it into WordPress to refresh it.

Next let‘s look at manually adding embed codes without a plugin…

Method #2: Manually Add Embed Code

The second option is skipping plugins and manually adding Google Slides oEmbed codes to your WordPress site code.

While doable, personally I don‘t recommend this for most users since it‘s more complex and prone to breaking in the future.

But for one-off embeds without installing new software, follow these expert steps:

1. Access Google Slides and enable Publish to Web
2. In embed settings popup » Publish and copy embed code
3. When editing a page/post in WordPress, switch to Text view
4. Paste the full Google Slides embed code
5. Save post and preview

Manually entering the embed code allows basic Google Slides integration without a plugin.

However, you lose out on plugin benefits like live previews, shortcode customization, and effortless updates. It‘s fine for one-time use but doesn‘t scale well.

Downsides of Manual Embed Codes

Relying purely on manual embed codes has some notable downsides to consider before ditching plugins:

• No Editor Previews: You won‘t see slides visuals as you edit content.
• Harder Updates: Must replace embed codes whenever Google updates API.
• Lack Customization: Can‘t tweak height, width, speed, etc without coding.
• Code Conflicts: Other plugins may clear/alter embed code via conflicts.

Overall, using standalone embed codes is an inferior approach in most use cases. The plugin route is faster, more customizable, and designed for specifically integrating Google Slides in WordPress.

I‘d only suggest forgoing plugins if you rarely embed slides or want a quick test integration. For actively presenting slides, use the plugin for the best experience.

Let me know if you have any other questions!