WordPress Featured Image: What It Is, Plus How to Use It Right

Your featured image in WordPress is the image that is meant to represent a post, page, a WooCommerce product or any other type of content page on your site. It usually appears on your blog post listing page and sometimes at the top of your individual blog posts.

For the most part, featured images are tucked away in the sidebar of the WordPress blog post editor, yet are a key option. You can assign a primary image for each post, both to act as a header and to go alongside on archive and search pages. Adding and optimizing featured images is a vital task on just about any WordPress blog.

In this post, we’ll explain what featured images are in more detail and show you some examples. Then we’ll walk you through how to improve the way you use each featured image on your own site. Lastly, I’ll show you how you can generate featured images for your site automatically.

Let’s get to work!

Key Takeaways

Featured images represent your individual blog posts
They should be unique and original – matching your brand
Design featured images on your own or use legal ones from the web

What featured images are (and why they matter)

The WordPress Block Editor enables you to add whatever text and media you like to your blog posts. Each new paragraph or piece of media is placed into its own block, and together they make up the content of the post itself.

However, you also have a number of page-wide options in the sidebar to the right of the editor. Some of these are settings we’ve discussed in the past, such as categories and tags. Though, one that’s particularly easy for newcomers to overlook is the Featured Image section:

Here, you can add a single image to represents the post as a whole. Simply click on Set featured image, then, you’ll be able to either upload a new image or choose a file from your Media Library. You can also provide a caption, ‘alt’ text, and description like any other image.

When you’re done, hit Select, and a thumbnail of the image will appear in the Featured Image section:

As a general rule, this image doesn’t appear within the body of the post itself, although how a featured image is displayed depends on your active theme. Still, most of the time it will appear in your post’s header, somewhere near the title:

This makes a featured image crucial, as it’s the first thing readers will see, and will set the tone for the entire post. What’s more, this isn’t the only place featured images appear. They’re also used to represent individual articles in lists of posts, such as on archive and search pages:

If you run any type of site that publishes new content regularly, it’s vital to add a featured image to each one. Plus, since these images will do a lot to determine your site’s visual style (and even its performance), it pays to spend some time choosing and preparing them carefully.

How to use featured images effectively on your WordPress site

You can use anything you like for your WordPress posts’ featured images. However, given how prominent they are, it’s best to be strategic about how you use them. Let’s look at a few of the best techniques for getting the most you can out of each featured image.

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1. Use images licensed by Creative Commons or under any other “free to use” license

If you have a talented photographer or illustrator on your team, you can create original featured images for your blog. This is the ideal scenario, but is often hard to achieve. Not only do you need someone with both the required expertise and time – you’ll also have to create a lot of unique images, especially if you post regularly.

Here are some examples of our own featured images that you can find on this very blog:

To create this image template, we use Canva – here’s how to use Canva for blog images.

For most blogs, however, using third-party images is a better solution. Even here, you have a few options. You can pay for images from a stock site, or you can use Creative Commons-licensed media. While there’s nothing wrong with the first approach, the latter offers a number of benefits:

Creative Commons images are free, and you may even be able to use them on a monetized blog (depending on the specifics of the license).
You have a lot of options to choose from, and there are entire sites dedicated to collecting and sharing these images. Unsplash is one of the most popular such sites over the last couple of years.
Again depending on the license, you should be able to modify the images. This means you can start from an existing photo or illustration, and add your own tweaks and branding.

Finally, if you do use a Creative Commons featured image, don’t forget to credit the source! This is good practice, even if it’s not strictly required for every license. A simple line at the end of the post, such as “Featured image: John Smith”, will get the job done.

2. Keep the style of your featured images consistent

Since every post has its own featured image (that may appear in multiple locations across your site), these images make up a large proportion of your site’s media. Therefore, it’s worth considering how they help to represent not just your individual content, but also your site as a whole.

While you can simply choose whatever image seems most appropriate for each article, a better strategy is to keep all your featured images consistent. For example, you can go with realistic images:

Or, you can opt for a more abstract look:

Either way, the style of image you lean towards should reflect your site’s branding and tone – for example, serious and professional, or fun and whimsical.

However, make sure that if you have multiple authors writing posts, everyone is clear on the style for your featured images. Alternately, you could put one team member in charge of finding and editing a featured image for each new post. This makes it a lot easier to ensure they all look good when placed next to one another. To save time, you can create a template with Canva that you use for each post and use a plugin to edit featured images in bulk.

Finally, in the interests of consistency, you’ll also want to select a standardized size for each featured image. What this is will be entirely up to you, although we’d recommend choosing dimensions with a longer width than height (as this tends to look better, especially on mobile devices).

You also don’t want your featured images to be too large, as this can have a negative effect on your site. This brings us to our final tip.

3. Make sure all your posts have featured images

The one thing you really have to remember about is to make sure that all your blog posts have featured images. If you miss some posts, forget to add featured images to them, you’re risking your whole blog looking unprofessional and inconsistent.

This can be particularly difficult if you’ve been working on your blog for a number of years now and your previous strategies didn’t include much focus on your featured images.

In other words, it really isn’t fun to have to look for featured images for one hundred, two hundreds, or even more posts from your past archives.

Luckily, there are plugins that can help you with that. For example, you can use a plugin called Auto Featured Image (free).

It can help you create featured images for your blog posts in a couple of ways.

The first option is to let the plugin look through your blog posts – all your blog posts – find the first image in each one, and then assign that image to be the featured image.

The second option is to create featured images based on post titles alone. The plugin will simply grab your post title, put it on top of some nice colored background and save that as the featured image. It’s really basic but can still be a great touch to make sure all your posts have their unique visual identification. Of course, it’s best to pick your brand colors to serve as those background colors.

Then, you can upgrade to the pro version of the plugin to get advanced image styling, direct integration with Unsplash (fetching images from there automatically), post filtering (to decide on the specific groups of posts to generate images for), and more.

4. Optimize each WordPress featured image

As we’ve already noted, featured images can eventually make up a big chunk of your site’s media library. This means they may ultimately have an effect on your site’s performance too.

We’ve discussed the importance of a speedy site in the past, as well as the effect of images on loading times, so we won’t repeat ourselves too much here. Long story short, it’s vital to keep your pages loading fast. What’s more, lots of large, high-quality images can slow your site down significantly.

The answer is to optimize each WordPress featured image, before uploading it to your site (or during the upload process). This will make it ‘lighter’, and less likely to drag down your page speeds. Plus, with the right tool, you can compress images without a noticeable reduction in their quality.

For instance, you can download the Optimole plugin and install it on your site:

This will connect you to the Optimole image optimization service, and enable you to compress all of your site’s images, both new and old. There’s even a free plan, which will let you optimize unlimited images – if your site doesn’t get more than 2,000 visits per month.

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Conclusion

Featured images are a vital WordPress feature – one any blog owner can benefit from becoming familiar with. Adding a featured image to each post or article helps you visually represent the content for your readers. It can even be an essential part of your branding strategy.

Adding featured images in WordPress is simple. However, you’ll want to keep the following tips in mind: