How to Display YouTube Video Data with Blocks and Shortcodes

calendar_month Last updated: July 7, 2026

Once your videos live in WordPress as posts, the data is yours to display however you like — not just as a single embedded player. You can show a video’s title, its thumbnail, its view count, or its embed exactly where your layout needs it, in the block editor or anywhere a shortcode runs.

WPBuoy Video Sync Pro ships dedicated Gutenberg blocks and a shortcode for precisely this.

Beyond a Plain Embed

A raw YouTube embed gives you a player and nothing else. But each imported video carries a full set of metadata: title, description, duration, view count, like count, channel title, thumbnail, URL, and video ID. Surfacing those pieces individually lets you build custom video layouts — a grid of thumbnails, a stats line under a player, a styled title that links out — instead of being limited to the default embed.

The Blocks: Embed, Field, and Image

Video Sync Pro registers three blocks in the editor:

  • Video Embed — drops in the video’s player.
  • Video Field — outputs a single piece of the video’s data, such as the title, description, duration, view count, like count, channel title, URL, or video ID.
  • Video Image — displays the video’s thumbnail at the size you choose.

How to Use the Blocks

Edit a video post (or any post), add one of the WPBuoy Video Sync blocks from the block inserter, and configure it in the block settings. The Video Field block lets you select exactly which field to output, so you can compose a layout from individual data points rather than one fixed template.

Using the Shortcode

Outside the block editor — in a widget, a page builder, or a classic-editor template — use the [video-sync] shortcode. It accepts attributes for the field to display, the video ID to read from, and sizing, for example:

[video-sync field="title" id="VIDEO_ID"]
[video-sync field="view_count" id="VIDEO_ID"]
[video-sync field="thumbnail" id="VIDEO_ID" size="large"]

This makes imported video data portable anywhere shortcodes are supported.

What You Get with Pro

The display blocks and shortcode are Pro features. Video Sync Pro also delivers unlimited channels, recurring schedules, taxonomy assignment, import filters, and metadata updates on existing posts.

Show Your Video Data Your Way

Imported videos are more than embeds — they are structured data you can present however your design calls for. Build custom video layouts with the blocks and shortcode in Video Sync Pro, or start with WPBuoy Video Sync free from WordPress.org.