How to embed a PDF document viewer in your Wix website

Imagine this situation: you put a lot of effort into creating a document with beautiful fonts and design, but the person reading your document sees a completely different font and the images are in the wrong position!

You would probably feel really disappointed and afraid that your competence might be questioned.

This situation can happen with documents in their original formatting: Microsoft Word (docx), Apple Pages, OpenOffice.

This is where PDF documents come in. A documents that is converted to PDF will be the same in its styling and fonts no matter what device it is read on.

You don't have to worry about the consistency of your documents. You can be sure that the receiver will see exactly the same document you have created.

This is what makes PDF the perfect format for embedding documents into your website.

In this blog, you are going to learn how to embed a PDF document viewer in your Wix website.

In this paragraph, we will discuss an easy way to include a PDF attachment to your webpage. This is not a PDF viewer, but just an icon that will allow the visitor to download a PDF. If you are looking to embed a PDF viewer, you can skip to the next chapter.

You can also add customization on top of the uploaded PDF document. Let's discuss this briefly.

If you are looking for a solution to display the PDF document on your website, you can install a Wix app from the Wix app market.

Be aware that this option has limitations. You cannot prevent your documents from being downloaded. You do not receive analytics to track your documents' performance, and the viewer is not customizable to your brand. If you are interested in these features, skip to the next chapter.

1. Click on the Wix apps shortcut on the left side of the Wix editor to launch the Wix app market.
2. Then search for "PDF viewer"

All PDF display techniques we have discussed above lack some important features. CloudPDF fills in these gaps and even allows you to customize the PDF viewer into the brand colors of your business. Let's check out the CloudPDF features Lead Generation, Download Prevention, and Analytics.

Lead generation: CloudPDF offers a feature that can help you generate leads from your PDF file. You can popup a lead form at a pre-defined time or based on which part of the document the reader is viewing. The user needs to fill in personal info like his email address in order to proceed reading the document. This can be a great way to increase the size of your mailing list.

Download Prevention: Imagine you are selling an online course. You don't want to give it away for free, but if the PDF is downloadable, you will have a hard time avoiding it. With the CloudPDF viewer, you can prevent the PDF from being downloaded. In addition to that, you can allow embedding of the document only from specific domain names.

Analytics: CloudPDF offers tracking on your PDF files. You can view analytics of your PDF file by just clicking on the analytics tab on the CloudPDF dashboard. You can track visitors' demographics and how long they viewed the PDF file. How cool is that?

If one of these features is necessary for your Wix website, then the CloudPDF viewer is the way to go.

First, create a free account on the CloudPDF website. Then click on the dashboard option. Here you can upload, encrypt and track your PDF files very easily.

1. Click on the new button and upload your first PDF file to CloudPDF.

You can customize the PDF viewer by editing the config option inside the HTML code. Here you can see, I have added a new red theme color and enabled the app bar color.

This is the result you can get after you made these changes.

You can also add PDF documents from your Google Drive to your Wix website. Let's understand this process step-by-step.

1. First, right click on the file in your Google Drive account to open the context menu and click on the Get link option.

Now you are done. Congratulations on successfully adding a PDF viewer to your Wix website.

This is a comprehensive guide to embedding PDF files in your Wix website.

The native upload feature of Wix allows you to upload a PDF but is not a PDF viewer.

The PDF viewer app from the Wix store is probably the easiest method and allows you to embed a PDF viewer into your Wix website.

CloudPDF has more features like "prevent download of the PDF", "PDF analytics", "Viewer customization" and the ability to generate lead from your PDF documents. You can implement it in your Wix website with a simple code snippet.

Google Drive does allow you to prevent downloading of the PDF, but it does not give you the ability to customize your viewer or provide analytics insight. It is also not a native Wix app, so it requires a code snippet.

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If you are using squarespace insted of wix, you can checkout this guide on How to embed a PDF viewer in Squarespace.

Yes, Go to the media option on the left side of the PDF editor and click on the upload file button. There you can upload your preferred type of document including PDF files.

First, add a lightbox from the Interactive elements section. Now, click on the Add element button again and add an Embed HTML element on top of your lightbox. Paste the HTML code to display the PDF file. Hit update and you are done.