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Creating Featured Images in WordPress

Featured Image Best Practices

Set Per Post

Document panel > Featured Image > Set.

Aspect Ratio

Theme dictates ratio — typically 16:9 or 4:3.

Alt Text

Describe the image for accessibility.

Use in Theme

Themes display featured images on archives, social shares.

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Featured images are a great way to draw attention to your blog posts. Not only are they visually appealing, but they can link to specific blog content. Watch our free tutorial to find out more.

Why Have a Featured Image?

Often, if you have a blog, you'll have a long blog roll, and you want to entice people to visit your blog and view particular posts. So people will use, if their theme allows it, something called a Featured Image that puts a big image right above the post itself. Visitors can either click on the title or the big image to get in and read all of the content.

This feature is especially important if your particular theme has only sections of your post visible, or if you've added Read More tags to your posts.

To enable featured images, I have to click on my Settings and select Featured Image from the scroll-down menu. I'll expand that, and because there's no image set yet, I'm going to click Set Featured Image. It's going to take me to my Media Library, but that likely is not where you're going to grab the picture. You'll probably want to add something new, so I'll demonstrate how by uploading an image. I'll select a file here.

It's added to my Media Library. I can add some other information while I'm here. I'll click Select.

There it is, showing up as my Featured Image.

I'm going to update this. Notice the green bar. It worked.

This is what the post typically looks like in the blog roll. However, I'm going to refresh this, and you'll notice there's that image at the top of the blog roll itself. You might notice the image is now blue, though it wasn't before. This is something the theme is specifically doing to this particular featured image. So I may have to change that in my theme, or maybe the theme doesn't allow for that, but it's going to be different based upon whatever theme you happen to be using.

But there's the featured image, and I can click on that if I want to and go and read all of the text in this particular post.

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