How to Add Subtitles to a YouTube Video (Step by Step)
· 5 min read
Captions are one of the easiest ways to keep viewers watching. A large share of mobile viewers start videos with the sound off, and many people rely on captions because they are deaf, hard of hearing, or watching in a second language. YouTube can generate automatic captions, but they often miss names, brand terms and punctuation. Uploading your own subtitle file fixes that.
Step 1: Get a subtitle file (SRT)
An SRT file is a plain-text file with numbered captions and the time each one should appear. You can type it by hand, but it is much faster to generate it from your video automatically.
- Download your video from YouTube Studio (Content → ⋮ menu → Download), or use the original file from your editor.
- Upload it to our free subtitle generator and choose the spoken language.
- When the transcript is ready, click Download SRT.
Step 2: Check names and key terms
Open the SRT in any text editor (Notepad, TextEdit or VS Code). Search for people's names, product names and technical terms and correct any that were misheard. Only edit the text lines; leave the numbers and the timecode lines (00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,200) exactly as they are.
Step 3: Upload the SRT to YouTube Studio
- Open YouTube Studio and click Subtitles in the left menu.
- Select your video, then click Add language if the language is not listed yet.
- Under Subtitles click Add, then choose Upload file.
- Select With timing, choose your SRT file and click Continue.
- Review the preview and click Publish.
Tips for readable captions
- Keep captions short: two lines of about 40 characters each is the standard for comfortable reading.
- Make sure the audio is clean. Background music under speech is the most common cause of caption errors.
- Publish captions in the video's spoken language first; translated captions can come later.
- Keep the transcript: paste it into the video description or a blog post to give search engines more text about your video.
That's it. Your video now has accurate captions that viewers can switch on, and YouTube has a better understanding of what your video is about.