Beginner's Guide: Everything you need to know about featured images in WordPress
In this multi-part article series, I want to cover everything you need to know about WordPress featured images. The series is intended as a beginner's guide to featured images, but should also have one or two tips for advanced WordPress users.
Why a series on featured images?
I get a lot of support inquiries that revolve around the topic of featured images. While WordPress beginners often ask themselves why there are no images on archive pages or in the slider as in the theme demo, even experienced WordPress users often have questions - including:
- Why are featured images cut off or distorted?
- How can I change the size of the featured images?
- How can I adjust the image section of the featured image?
- Why do my pictures no longer fit the new layout after changing the theme?
- Why is my post picture not sent to Facebook when sharing social media?
- How can I replace featured images with videos?
I would like to clarify all these questions as well as additional tips, tricks and plugin recommendations in this beginner's guide.
The basics: what is a featured image?
Featured images are basically a feature for WordPress theme authors and are therefore only available if the theme used also supports featured images. It feels like 99% of all themes. In addition to themes, plugins can also support featured images, for example in newly registered custom post types.
With the support of featured images in the theme, a single , representative image can be assigned to each contribution or static page. In English, the featured image is therefore often called a post thumbnail, but the official English term in WordPress is Featured Image . The feature was introduced with WordPress 2.9.
Important to know for the beginning: The display of the featured image is completely controlled by the theme. The theme decides in which size, orientation, format and position the featured image appears. It also specifies on which templates (blog index, archive pages, individual posts) the post image is actually displayed. Featured images can therefore be used very differently in different themes.
In contrast to normally added images in the editor, WordPress initially offers few options for adapting the featured image without the use of extra plugins. As a WordPress beginner without knowledge of how the featured images work, this fact can be a bit confusing at first.
Content of the article series via WordPress featured images
So far there is only a rough planning of the article series, which is why the articles may still change slightly. In addition to the basics, I would like to show how WordPress featured images can be adapted and which practical plugins exist for this. I would like to address the following topics in the article series over the next few weeks.
Table of Contents:
Don't want to miss the series? Then I recommend subscribing to my blog to conveniently receive new posts by email.
If you have any questions or requests about featured images, please write a comment.
I also have another question:
If you use images from third parties, such as from the pixelio.de website, as contribution images, is there a way to make the author visible?
Hello Christian,
Good question! Most themes (including mine) only display the featured image itself. The image captions are usually not displayed with the contribution image. These would of course be ideal for photo credits.
But there are plugins to add image captions to the featured images. For example https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/featured-image-caption/
I will take up the topic again as part of the article series and test the plugins more closely.
Otherwise, the author of the picture could of course also be named in the post itself.
LG,
Brian
Point 8 sounds exciting! And after a lot of saved time! 😉
Yes, if you do something about it you realize: There are tons of plugins for featured images. I try to test the various plugins as comprehensively as possible as part of the article series.
A plugin for mass editing that I would like to try out is, for example, Quick Featured Images: https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/quick-featured-images/
I would also have a problem with the featured images:
I use the "Newspaper" theme, especially "Business" and would like to include posts from Twitter, Facebook, etc. I loaded the "Featured Image from URL" plugin. Everything looks perfect in the post, the post and the post image are loaded. The picture is then missing on the homepage or blog page, only a gray box appears with the title of the article. Does somebody has any idea?
Hello Olga,
I'm sorry, but I don't know the plugin. I would therefore ask this question in the plugin's support forum: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/featured-image-from-url
The plugin developer should know exactly why the plugin may not work on the blog page.
Many Greetings,
Brian
Hello Brian,
sorry, I formulated my request completely wrong: The plugin is only for embedding videos from e.g. YouTube and works perfectly. The preview can also be seen on the blog's homepage.
The problem is with pictures or posts from Twitter, Facebook, etc. Here I am unable to bring what can be seen in the post to the start page. Then there is only an empty gray box. Are there plugins for integrating Twitter etc.? and are they mandatory?
VG
Olga
This is, among other things, how the theme displays the posts in the blog and archives. If only the contribution excerpt (excerpt) is displayed instead of the full contribution, everything is removed except for pure text.
This post may help you further:https://themekiller.me/2018/01/18/wordpress-beitragsauszug-mit-advanced-excerpt-anhaben/
Otherwise, I advise you to contact the theme developer directly. He knows how his theme works.
Tweets and Facebook posts can simply be embedded in the visual editor by copying the URL, without plugins.
Many Greetings,
Brian