Basic WordPress has the built in functionality to add images to your layouts. You can also add movies, and insert various types of document.
These all come under the heading of Media and there is a simple mechanism to upload these from your computer, either singly or in multiples.
This article describes the various types of media you can and can’t upload, and the slight differences between doing this using a simple theme, and a more complex one like Divi.
WordPress is choosy about what types of file it will accept. The various types are listed in detail below.
Images and movies display as you would expect. Audio displays with audio player controls. Text, numerical and other types of document display as a link which will open the document in the same or another window.
To avoid complications I would stick to .jpeg/.jpg, .png or .gif for images and for text documents convert to .pdf format, which is universally compatible. You can’t make a file acceptable by changing it’s ending – it needs to be properly formatted for it’s file type – WordPress can tell and will refuse the upload.
Unacceptable file types, corrupted, incomplete or excessively large files will be refused.
There are a few ways in which files get uploaded, for instance when inserted into a layout alongside text, or as part of a gallery, as a background, as a linked document, or a logo etc.
In all cases uploaded files end up in the Media Library. (there is a link to this near the top of the black Dashbord menu on the left.) This means you only ever need to upload a particular file once. Thereafter you can select it from the Media Library. You always have the choice to upload or select from the Media Library.
Images
Images need to be of type .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif. More recently .webp and .heic images are accepted. Other formats may be acceptable with special plugins. Images display as images and there are various ways of controlling their size and positioning according to the theme.
Movies
Movies need to be of type .mp4, .m4v (MPEG-4), .mpg, .mov (QuickTime), .vtt, .avi, .ogv (Ogg), .wmv (Windows Media Video), .3gp (3GPP), .3g2 (3GPP2). Other formats may be acceptable with the help of special plugins.
PLEASE NOTE: Uploading video files can overload your website and slow down our server. Very short clips may be acceptable but in almost all cases we recommend hosting your movie on YouTube, Vimeo etc and inserting a link. This gives exactly the same effect as uploading to your website, but has all the advantages of being hosted on a platform that can deal with the large data throughput required. There are quite a few other video hosting sites and many are free to use.
Documents
Text, numerical and presentation formats are supported. These incliude .pdf (Portable Document Format; Adobe Acrobat), .doc, .docx (Microsoft Word Document), .xls, .xlsx (Microsoft Excel Document), .key (Apple Keynote Presentation), .odt (OpenDocument Text Document),.ppt, .pptx, .pps, .ppsx (Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation – plugin required)
Audio
Only the following are accepted .mp3, .ogg, .wav. Others may be acceptable with special plugins.
For more detail about this please visit: the WordPress Codex