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Ready to grow your audience?
Podcasting has been around for a long time, but only recently did it blow up as a popular medium.
These days, there’s a podcast for everything.
If you’re ready to join the wave and publish your podcast on your WordPress site, you’ll want to try one of the plugins listed here.
These are the top plugins available for promoting and playing podcasts with WordPress
If you haven’t found a great theme yet, check out our WordPress podcast themes collection for some excellent options.
WordPress podcast plugins
Almost all of the plugins below are free, but there is a paid plugin as well. All of these plugins come from reputable developers and work with the newest version of WordPress.
Without further ado, here are my top picks for the best WordPress podcast plugins.
1. Podcast Importer
Plugin Description
While some people will prefer to host their podcast natively with WordPress, it’s more common these days for podcasters to use another platform like Apple Podcasts, and that’s why I’ve listed this plugin first. It’s a must-have for any podcaster hosting their podcast RSS feed outside of WordPress.
Podcast Importer can sync your podcast so that every new episode is pulled to your WordPress site automatically, without any manual copying/pasting. It’s also great for importing a large number of episodes in bulk. It uses the default WordPress audio player but also supports embedded players from many popular podcast platforms.
With the Podcast Importer plugin, you’ll be able to import your episodes to WordPress, decide whether you want to import featured images, choose categories, include embedded podcast players, and more.
There’s also a Pro version in which you’ll be able to connect multiple feeds at the same time, import data to custom post types and taxonomies, get the audio player assigned to a custom field, and more
The Podcast Importer plugin makes your life as a podcaster a lot easier, as you won’t need to worry about manually adding content to your site!
2. Seriously Simple Podcasting
Plugin Description
This plugin has to come first in my opinion because it’s true to its name: Seriously Simple Podcasting.
You can get up and running very quickly with SSP, and the settings included strike a perfect balance between comprehensiveness and simplicity.
Once installed, SSP will add a new custom post type to your site for your podcasts. This way, you can publish podcast episodes separately from your blog posts. That said, you have the option to disable the podcast post types and use your regular posts for your episodes instead.
SSP also creates a podcast feed, which is critical for syndicating your podcast. You can promote your feed across the web so that aggregators can pick it up and broadcast it to a wider audience.
As for the on-site experience, SSP uses the default WordPress audio player which works well despite being light on features. There’s also a handful of widgets included to promote recent episodes or even feature individual episodes in your sidebar.
3. Fusebox
Plugin Description
Fusebox is my top recommendation for a WordPress podcast player plugin. While Seriously Simple Podcasting is a great plugin, Fusebox has way more features and its own customizable audio player.
This plugin is the only premium plugin included in this collection and you can tell based on its appearance. Unlike SSP’s simple audio player, Fusebox has a beautiful and highly advanced embeddable player. The shortcode system is easy to use and you can also customize the colors and other aspects of it.
Here, take another look at the player design (which is highly customizable):
Content like the title, description, and tags are all readily available. In addition, visitors can browse all episodes, skip forward/backward, and there’s even a search bar to find specific episodes.
On top of this, since Fusebox was made by a popular internet marketer, Pay Flynn, it has plenty of marketing tools built-in. It boasts its status on the homepage as “…the only podcast player that allows you to capture your listeners’ email addresses.”
While you certainly don’t need all of the features in this plugin to get started, it could be a cool upgrade for your site at some point.
4. Auto YouTube Importer
Plugin Description
The Auto YouTube Importer plugin helps YouTubers, Vloggers, and site owners who need to import their YouTube videos in bulk.
It allows users to import any YouTube channel with ease. The plugin imports your YouTube videos as posts, and includes the embedded video player right above your content, with the video thumbnail added as a featured image and the content pulled from YouTube.
The main feature of the plugin is that it’s continuously checking for new videos and importing them whenever they are published on YouTube. You don’t need to run the import manually every time you release a new video – the plugin will take care of that automatically!
The plugin also has a Pro version. With the Pro version, you’ll be able to connect multiple YouTube channels and import multiple videos from multiple sources continuously. You can also import the data to any custom post type or custom taxonomy. The Pro version supports importing the videos to custom fields if you prefer to control where the videos are being displayed.
5. PowerPress
Plugin Description
The makers behind this plugin, Blubrry, provided tools for podcasters long before podcasting was cool. In other words, they’ve been in the game a long time.
The PowerPress plugin has a ton of functionality for being a free plugin. You’ll find everything you need to manage your podcast from full Apple Podcasts support (formerly iTunes podcasts) to podcast feed creation. Your podcast feed will be perfectly optimized for Apple’s service and even SEO-optimized to rank well and reach more listeners. The feed created by PowerPress also works with Google’s Podcast directory.
In addition to all the features in this plugin, it also integrates with podcast hosting and many other tools offered by Blubrry. If I were ranking these plugins based on functionality alone, this would be my number one choice. However, from the admin menus to the audio player itself, this plugin isn’t especially well-designed. If you’re okay with taking some time to figure out how to use this plugin, it may be the best choice for your site.
6. Buzzsprout Podcasting
Plugin Description
Buzzsprout offers cheap podcast hosting for its users and has a WordPress plugin available to embed their simple audio player on your site.
While you need to use the Buzzsprout hosting to use this plugin effectively on your site, it is a nice option and has accumulated strong reviews from its existing users.
The audio player itself is pretty basic but does allow you to add individual episodes to posts or embed the “large player” which includes a list of episodes available for play.
Buzzsprout also excels at syndication thanks to its full iTunes support (now Apple Podcasts). You’ll have no trouble getting your podcast published to the world’s largest podcast catalog.
7. Podlove Podcast Publisher
Plugin Description
This is another free option for publishing your podcast that claims to be a more modern approach than its competitors.
With Podlove Podcast Publisher, you’ll keep all of your files hosted on your site so you always own the content. During the setup process, you’ll be able to select a directory where you keep the episodes. Furthermore, you can pick from different content formats allowing you to publish video podcasts in addition to traditional audio podcasts.
Despite their claims of simplicity, I did find this plugin to be a little more complex than some other options. That said, it’s got an interesting design and approach to solving the technical challenges of podcasting, and they offer some pretty cool features other solutions don’t have like download analytics.
Which podcast plugin is best for you?
Out of all the plugins available for podcasting, Seriously Simply Podcasting stands out as an excellent option. Unlike other plugins that only claim to be simple, SSP stands out as an intuitive and easy-to-use choice.
If you prefer to host your podcast on a platform outside of WordPress, then you’ll definitely want to install the Podcast Importer plugin to sync your latest episodes with your site.
If you’re looking for a plugin to add a gorgeous player to your site with built-in email list building features, nothing competes with Fusebox.
While the other three plugins could work great for your site, I wanted to highlight those two as they stand out in my mind as the best podcast plugins available.
Before you go, make sure to take a look at our podcast themes post to see some of the amazing WordPress themes available for your site.
