Quick Guide: How to Embed Google Slides Presentations in WordPress

If you’re any kind of online professional, Google Docs is a lifesaver. Easy collaboration, cloud storage…Google makes you happy to hand your life over to them! But up until now, most of our Google-focused posts have been focused on Google Docs and showing you skills like how to import Google Docs to WordPress with Jetpack or via some manual hacking.

But what if you aren’t just using Google Docs? What if you also like creating, say, Google Sheets presentations? How can you integrate your presentations with WordPress?

Well, if you glanced at the post title before you started reading, you can probably guess that that’s what I’m going to show you in this post.

Google Slides Presentations in WordPress? Why?

I think most people have this outdated views that slideshows are just for dull business presentations or class projects. And sure, I have created many a dull PowerPoint in my day…but that doesn’t mean slide presentations have to be snooze fests.

Sites like SlideShare are popular because people are, well, actually willing to sit down and watch a slideshow.

Personally, I would never create a slideshow from scratch just for a blog post. But if I already had a slideshow from a presentation I did? You bet I would repurpose that thing into a blog post.

Repurposing your slideshow allows you to get even more value from work you’ve already completed. All you need to do is write up a short descriptive post, embed your slideshow, and you’re off to the races.

Here’s how to accomplish that second part with Google Slides and WordPress…

How to Manually Add Google Slides Presentations to WordPress

The manual process for embedding Google Slides is pretty simple, so I don’t think that you’ll need any help from a plugin. But I will give you some plugin options at the end just in case.

To get started, open the presentation you want to embed in Google Slides. Then, head to File → Publish to the web:

Once you click, you should see a popup. Click on the Embed tab and choose your options.

For most WordPress themes, you’ll probably want to choose a width around ~700-800px. Additionally, you can choose:

• How quickly to auto-advance slides
• Whether or not to automatically start the slideshow as soon as the player loads (probably a bad idea)
• Whether or not to automatically restart the slideshow after it finishes

Choose accordingly and then click the Publish button:

Once you click Publish, you should see an embed code. Copy that code:

Then, head to the post or page in which you want to embed your Google Slides presentation and add the embed code to the Text tab of the WordPress Editor:

If you’re using a page builder, you should be able to still embed your Google Slides presentation by pasting the embed code into your page builder’s HTML or Code module. I can’t promise it will work for every single page builder out there (because I can’t test every page builder). But for most page builders, it should work just fine.

And then when you publish your post, you should see your embedded presentation:

And that’s it! I told you it was simple. But if you need to embed tons of Google Slides presentations, you might want a plugin to help manage things. In which case, you should keep reading the next section…

How to Integrate Google Slides With WordPress Using a Plugin

Personally, I think the manual method is plenty easy so there really isn’t any need for a plugin. But, plugins to help with embedding Google Slides (or Docs) both exist and have tens of thousands of active installs…so I guess plenty of people disagree with me!

So if you’re one of those people, here’s how you can use a plugin to add Google Slides presentations in WordPress.

I played around with a few options and in the end, I really liked a plugin called EmbedPress from PressShack. Here’s why I like it:

• You just need to paste in the URL to instantly embed a Google Slides presentation
• It’s regularly updated (17 hours ago at the time of writing this post)
• It handles far more than just Google Slides – currently, EmbedPress makes it easy to embed over 40 different content sources

A Quick Tutorial on EmbedPress

To use EmbedPress, get started by installing and activating it. Once you activate it, you can edit a few things about how EmbedPress functions. But it’s not necessary to change any of the settings.

Then, to embed your Google Slides presentation, head to your Google Slides interface and go to File → Publish to the web again. Only now, instead of going to the embed tab, all you need to do is grab the link:

Then, head to the post or page in which you want your slideshow to appear and just paste that raw link into the Visual tab of the WordPress Editor. EmbedPress should automatically generate a preview when you paste in the raw link:

Then, when you Publish your post or page, you should see your Google Slides presentation on the front-end:

As you can see, it looks identical to the embed generated by the manual method. So you’re not losing or gaining anything other than a little bit of convenience.

The cool thing, though, is that you can use the same idea to quickly embed other content like Google Sheets, Google Maps, Instagram, Facebook, and lots more. That is, all you need to do is paste in a link to one of those services and EmbedPress will work its magic.

So if you think that you’ll use EmbedPress for more than just Google Slides, it might make sense to opt for the plugin over the manual method. Otherwise, I recommend just manually grabbing the Google Slides embed code.

Wrapping Things Up

So there it is…two different ways to embed Google Slides presentations in WordPress. I don’t think it’s an especially complicated process, but it seems to cause trouble for people who are new to WordPress, so I hope that this post was able to shine a light on just how the process works.

And if you want another method to embed slideshows in WordPress, Yoast has a dedicated SlideShare WordPress plugin that makes it easy. Obviously, that isn’t Google Slides, but I’m sure some people prefer using SlideShare over Google because SlideShare presentations rank fairly well in Google organic search.