Embed a Youtube Channel or Playlist in Squarespace

Content Blocks

Jun 30

Super excited to share this one because I recently figured it out and could only find a lot of partial or complex answers on the internet. This is a super easy solution, requiring no custom code or 3rd party widgets!

This solution involves embedding a Youtube Channel or playlist in a video block. The most recent video will always show up first, and the others will appear in a dropdown list.

Solution 1: Embed a Playlist

If it’s simple, your Youtube channel may have all its videos in one playlist called “Uploads”. Or your channel may be more complex and you want to embed only a specific playlist within the channel.

To do so, log into your Youtube channel. In the admin panel on the left, click on the playlist you want to embed. If you want to embed all your videos, look for a playlist called “Uploads”. (If there is no playlist called “Uploads,” use Solution 2 below.) Then click the share icon that appears and copy the link. Do not try to use the embed code; it won’t work.

Then, go to Squarespace and create a new Video Block. Past the link into the “Video URL” section. Again, do not try to paste the embed code into the “custom embed code” section, just use the link. Here is the result. You can see it is showing the most recent video, and the rest of the playlist is available by clicking the playlist icon in the top right-hand corner.

For reference, the url has this format: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3CYY8Raf4c_okd7h_XfRQMMZGStIQg7Y, with the “list=PL3 etc” being the custom string that identifies that playlist on YouTube. This means that you can embed ANY playlist on your website, not just your own, by using the same code.

For example, here’s the Hamilton playlist on Disney. All I did was click “Play All” on that playlist, copy the playlist custom id as shown below, and paste it into the same url listed above.

Solution 2: Embed an Entire Channel

This solution begins with this basic url:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLISTCUSTOMID

You will embed your entire channel by finding the playlist custom id for your channel and pasting it into the url above to replace everything after “list=”.

To find the playlist custom id for your entire channel, log into your Youtube account. Click “Your Videos” in the admin panel. Then click “Play All”. This will load a new url with a playlist custom id for your entire channel. Copy the part of the url that comes after “list=”. Do not copy the whole url, as it is set to play a given video first (the v= part of the url) and this will not update when you add new videos to your channel.

Replace “PLAYLISTCUSTOMID” in the url above with the playlist custom id you just copied. Paste this new url into a Squarespace video block and Bob’s your uncle! For example, here is a playlist of all Disney’s videos.

Note: this option doesn’t seem to work if your videos are private or unlisted. It seems to work for public videos. Let me know if you discover something different.