Website Like YouTube: How To Make It in 2023? ( Detailed Guide)

How to Make a Website Like Youtube: Overview

How to make a website like YouTube? Today, many people ask this question and try to find as much information as possible related to this topic. Video hosting services like Youtube are an opportunity to natively tell about yourself and your company to a large audience, promote your business and gain customer loyalty.

Owners of sites like YouTube can pursue various goals, from corporate to the desire to create specialized hosting. Moreover, companies use such sites for monetization, advertising and link them to their e-commerce site, blog or forum.

Every month, a third of the world’s population watches an average of 4 videos on YouTube channels. The owner of the service, Google LLC, is getting richer every year by $10 billion. Many ask questions about the popularity of what it is caused by, what are the secrets. And we will try to figure out how you can create such a video hosting yourself.

What Do You Need Before Making a Website Like YouTube?

If you decide to create your own video hosting service, adhere to one of the essential rules. Don’t make another YouTube! We have prepared this guide to help you figure out how to make a site like YouTube and where to begin. If you want to create a really useful website and then use it to achieve your goals, you should start with these simple steps:

Start from business plan

Think about how to create a video streaming website like YouTube and achieve success? Thanks to a well-written business plan, you will be able to calculate the costs, risks and web resource payback. You will also manage to accomplish the following tasks in advance:

• Estimate the cost of the project and its monetization 

Site сreation and development is not the most expensive part of the work. The main costs will fall on the resource promotion. A business plan for creating a video hosting service allows you to plan expenses and determine the project’s payback period and profitability.

• Competitive research

By thoroughly analyzing your competitors, you can shorten your project’s payback period and increase its profitability.

• Determine ways of the project promotion

The business plan for the site creation should indicate the ways to promote the project. Thanks to this, you will correctly distribute your entire budget and subsequently act clearly and competently.

Know your users

Personas are fantastic! If you don’t have them, or if you have but don’t use them, you’re losing out on a whole host of business advantages. User research is an excellent technique to understand the individuals for whom you are developing a website like YouTube.

User interviews and contextual inquiries, focus groups, and surveys are all standard research methods for understanding current users’ needs, expectations, and aims. Feelings and emotions are occasionally expressed during user interviews, although they are not generally the main emphasis of the research.

User interviews based on task analysis frequently include the following topics:

• Who they are (profile);
• What they do, when and where (context);
• Why they do it (needs, goals, tasks) ;
• How they do it (experience);
• What they like or dislike (frustrations).

Create a project plan

When it comes to the question of how to make a video-sharing website like YouTube, it might feel that completing the task as soon as possible is the best option. However, focusing on work without a project action plan might be the difference between a successful and a chaotic outcome.

What is the reason behind this? Because website development projects typically involve multidisciplinary teams with various skills coming together at different stages and times. When multiple people are involved, you’ll need a collaborative space where everyone can clearly understand work, responsibilities, and progress. Let’s figure out what are the main components of a website project plan:

• Project definition

At this point, you should establish the purpose of developing your website. Do you want to improve the user experience? Do you want to increase sales? Set goals and ensure that everyone involved is on the same page.

• Budget

Creating a plan for your website project can assist you in determining a cost estimate and total revenue. It will also help you in distributing your resources and making accurate decisions.

• Team and roles

Take the time before you start laying down work to designate defined tasks to your key team members and ensure that everyone understands their position.

• Documentation and requirements

Create a clear list of functionalities and features that need to be included.

• Content

Your website’s content and appearance should match each other. You must be able to express the brand’s voice and vision to your audience, as well as making it simple for them to find what they’re searching for straight away. Solicit feedback from clients and stakeholders to discover more about branding, voice, and style.

• Design

Collaborate with your team to develop an idea that incorporates visual elements to help you explain your idea.

Think about monetization and promotion

Every business owner fantasizes not only about how to create a website like YouTube but also how to make it big, attract a large audience, and generate a lot of money while remaining ahead of their competition.

However, your enthusiasm and perplexity will almost certainly lead to a few thought-provoking questions, such as:

• How to make money by monetizing your website?
• How long does it take for your website to become profitable?
• Should you use a single website monetization approach or a variety of website monetization tactics to monetize your website? and others.

However, figuring out the best strategy to make money from a website might be challenging at first. However, once you’ve figured out how to monetize your website, you’ll have no trouble making a profit.

Also, don’t forget about promotion. A website can assist you in attracting new customers. Customer feedback/opinion on a freshly released product or service is now easy to obtain thanks to the internet. Website promotion helps in attracting the most attention from a certain customer category.

Top Features in 2023

To help you address how to make a website like YouTube as much as possible, we have compiled a list of features in demand in 2022. But remember about your users, it is essential not to forget what they need and what they like.

User-friendly dashboard

The dashboard is an essential part of any video hosting website that helps track the performance of the videos. It also informs users of news, trends and interaction with content.

People can use the dashboard to understand what videos people like, what they ignore, what they need to improve, etc. In general, it helps improve the content strategy.

Analytics

This feature is usually used to assess the quality of the content provided. Analytics allows to collect data that shows how people interact with videos, how many likes/dislikes videos get, what types of videos gain a large number of views and what types go unnoticed.

Fully-featured trial

It is all about the minimization of users’ investment risk. This refers to subscription-based plans that allow users to test the platform without risking making a mistake. It can be a fully-featured trial, a free version, or monthly plans without a commitment.

Security

Security of data and content is a must. Provide your website with security features that include minimum IP restrictions, domain restrictions and registration pages with password protection.

Integrations

We are living in an integrated world. Providing your website with the ability to integrate with leading marketing platforms, learning management systems and CRMs will help you take your web product to a new level. Video training resources are used by learning organizations just as much as marketers use videos to engage prospects, customers, and partners.

How To Make A Website Like Youtube: With WordPress (small-size project)

If your project is not very big but has a specific theme, you can use WordPress to create a website like YouTube. Our team has prepared a small guide on how to do it effectively.

Step#1 Select hosting and a domain name

Consider a hosting company’s flexibility and capacity to scale with your organization while making your decision. Keep in mind that picking a domain name is a major matter. A website’s domain name is similar to a person’s name.

Step#2 Connect WordPress with your Domain

The next step is to start running a website on WordPress. WordPress powers 41% of sites on the Internet. Bloggers, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies use it to achieve their goals.

Why is WordPress a good option?

• It is an open-source CMS
• It is user friendly and provides many plugins
• You are not required to have coding knowledge to use it

Step#3 Choose and install a video sharing theme

The theme will not only give your site a nice look, but it will also add new functionality that will make it work like YouTube and any other video hosting sites.

You can choose any theme, but one of the most popular are VideoStories, GoVideo and VideoPro.

Step#4 Add additional plugins

Additional plugins will help you improve your website functionality. You can use, for example, Video Slider that allows you to create video sliders that work on all devices or add FV Flowplayer that will help you embed FLV or MP4 videos on WordPress.

Step#5 Launch your website

After you successfully complete all the steps named above, you can start launching and promoting your YouTube-similar website.

How To Make A Website Like YouTube: Custom Development (medium and enterprise size). Step-by-Step Guide

Suppose your company develops a large project, wants to make a unique design, makes a website like YouTube with various features and quickly and confidently develops it. In that case, you need to think about custom development. We want to present you with a step-by-step guide that will help you figure out how this process should be walked through.

#1 Start from planning, budgeting, business model

How to make a website like YouTube and prevent project failure? Let’s figure it out. According to the statistics, 90% of projects fail due to a lack of planning in the early stages of development. The remaining 10% is luck, but you shouldn’t rely on it. High-quality planning will allow you to avoid most mistakes during your web product development and, in general, will speed up this process.

Also, don’t forget to calculate your budget. If you do not know how much money you will need to implement the project at the initial stages, the development process will most likely be suspended or delayed indefinitely.

At this stage, it is essential to think about your business model. You don’t create a website simply because someone tells you to. You develop it with business or organizational goals in mind. Try to think of your website benefits in monetary terms and then choose a business model that is the most suitable for you.

#2 Select the Best Design & Web Development Partner

Correctly selected teams and partners are half the battle. Video hosting websites like YouTube have been recruiting the best specialists for their projects for months.

If you want to achieve great results and enjoy your product, you shouldn’t save time and money on hiring professionals. Moreover, nowadays, it is not a big challenge. The main thing is desire and aspiration.

Our projects like Zettlo and JustAskMe were successfully designed and developed by our teams and have already gathered users’ hearts. In case you need any help with your web product realization,

Start from MVP

An MVP is the most basic version of a product built first and foremost to understand the market reaction to the solution. To find out how to make a video-sharing website like YouTube and prevent failures, think about MVP first.

According to one study, nearly half of company failures occur because there is no market need for them. Will anyone use the product? Is there a competitive edge to it? These are the kind of inquiries that an MVP may address.

The MVP idea is based on the Lean Startup methodology. The build-measure-learn loop is at the core of the concept. The necessity of learning is emphasized in Lean Startup, as the product is formed by customer input. Isn’t it wiser to observe how people engage with a product rather than asking what they would do? And an MVP is the ideal one to use.

Create your own Video Hosting design. Right UX.

Why is UX design important for your business and how to make a website like YouTube for free?

Everything is simple: the more hospitable you are to your guests, the better they treat you as a host in return, and the better they respond to you. This old rule still works today. To paraphrase, the better you treat your site visitors, the better reputation they will create for your brand. 

Here are the main benefits you can get from creating your own website design and the right UX:

• A good UX increases return on investment
• The right UX provides a positive reputation for your brand
• UX helps to withstand competition
• It increases customer loyalty
• The good UX keeps users on your site longer

According to Digitalapeel, 52% of users say the main reason why they won’t return to a website is aesthetics and 90% of users have stopped using web products due to poor performance.

Testing on your users

How to make a video website like YouTube and don’t lose potential users? User testing is a form of research in which the participants use your website. As a result, you’ll be able to observe what works and what doesn’t. Testing video hosting sites is vital since they have numerous features and will be used by a huge number of people in the future.

Here are some advantages of user testing:

• You receive feedback directly from the target audience
• You can identify potential problems and issues before the product is released
• It reduces the risk or possibility of product failure
• Internal discussions can be settled by putting the problem to the test to observe how users react to the various options under consideration.

Starting your development

After you have completed all the steps named above, you can start the development process. At this moment, you turn your concept into a real product, taking into account all of the key aspects of a video website that we discussed before. Your task is to ensure that the product’s concept can be translated into a working sample.

Test and Launch your Video hosting

Running multiple tests on your online product’s features and capabilities is a must-do to ensure flawless operation. QA personnel ensure that the final product is of the highest quality and integrity. The following are the most important QA requirements:

• Maintains a comprehensive QA checklist ensuring all designs, content, and assessment resources work properly.
• Checks platform and device compatibility of the video hosting.
• Scrutinizes every individual functionality.
• Performs regression testing after each sprint.

Get the result and make analysis

You should analyze the collected data before beginning to build a full-scale web product. It’s better if you analyze what you need to enhance in the future product, get rid of everything that doesn’t make sense, plan your next steps, and get ready to build a full-size video hosting website. Remember to include the product implementation project plan in your strategy.

All of these stages will assist you in creating a valuable and sought-after product.

Start building full-size product

Building a unique video hosting website is quite a challenging process. You’ll be ready to develop the full-size video platform once you’ve completed all of the steps listed above. Do not rush to avoid missing important points. Take into account all you’ve done up to this final stage. Since you will have an MVP product version, it will be much easier to create a full-size one.

How much does it cost to make a website like YouTube?

The cost of such services will vary based on your needs, functionality, site size, hosting type, and a variety of other considerations.

With WordPress (small-size project)

Depending on your needs and wishes, your cost to start a WordPress video hosting website can range from $300 to $1000. To remind you that this option is suitable for small projects. If you want to do custom development, look at the prices below.

Custom Development (medium and enterprise size)

For a website similar to YouTube, the cost could vary between $50,000 to $200,000.

The following is an estimate of the cost of developing the video hosting website:

How to make a website like YouTube: Wrapping up

In this article, we have covered all the key points in creating a website like YouTube. In order to build a truly unique video hosting, you will need to put in a lot of effort. But it will be worth it.