How many times have you scanned a blog archive or a social feed only to see a wall of post titles and links with nothing to capture your interest?
How long did you stay on that blog or feed?
If you’re anything like us, you wouldn’t have stayed long and probably wouldn’t have taken in much of what was on the page.
Of all the images you can use on a website, the featured image is most important.
It can attract attention, encourage people to click, give them a clue about what the page is about and add a little character at the same time.
Featured images are so important, we’re dedicating an entire post to them.
We’re going to discuss everything you need to know about WordPress featured images.
We’ll discuss ideal size, how to change sizes and share some tips and best practices to help you ensure they look great every time!
What Is a WordPress Featured Image?
A featured image appears at the top of your posts, the post archive page, and the related posts section.
It may also appear when you share a post on social media.
The featured image draws the visitor’s attention to your content and hints at what your posts are about.
This helps increase clickthrough rates boosting the number of page visitors.
Why You Need Featured Images
Have you stopped scrolling through a social media feed or blog page when an image grabs your attention?
That ability to instantly capture readers is why you need a featured image.
Competition for our attention is fierce and we need to use every trick in the book to get clicks and keep people reading.
Featured images help with that.
They can also:
- Attract attention and increase engagement: Images help you show and tell, provide a moment’s rest from your text and engage the audience more.
- Help with comprehension: Use illustrative featured images and additional visuals throughout content to help tell the story.
- Build your brand: Using a signature style, color or typography can help build a personal connection.
- Sell products: If you run an online store, featured images are incredibly powerful conversion tools.
- Boost SEO: Properly formatted featured images with alt text can help accessibility, visual search and overall SEO ranking.
- Improve social media sharing: If your featured image looks good on social networks, it’s more likely to be shared.
These are just a few of the many benefits to using featured images. We’re sure you can think of others.
Is There an Ideal Featured Image Size?
Yes, there is an ideal featured image size. It’s 1200 pixels by 628 pixels.
Most WordPress themes work with this size and Google Discover recommends a minimum width of 1200 pixels.
Social media works on ratios, with Facebook and X (Twitter) preferring between 2:1 and 300:175.
But that’s just an ideal.
You don’t have to use that size at all if you don’t want to.
Use a size that’s right for your WordPress theme, your brand and your personal taste.
Whatever size you choose, just keep it consistent for all your featured images.
How To Change Default WordPress Image Size
You can easily customize the image settings in WordPress if you want to.
Navigate to Settings > Media and customize the Max Width and Max Height fields.
Then select Save Changes when you’re done.
WordPress automatically resizes images to fit onto most screen sizes so that’s all you need to do.
Use a responsive WordPress theme and your featured image should look great whatever device visitors use!
Resize Old Featured Images
If you changed any of the sizes earlier, all new images will be sized to those dimensions when you upload them.
Images already in your media library won’t always be resized. You’ll need to either do it manually or use a plugin.
To resize manually, select the image in your media library and select Edit Image at the bottom of the page.
Select the Scale button on the next screen and set your chosen dimension.
As soon as you hit that blue Scale button, WordPress will resize the image and save it.
As you can imagine, this is a tedious process, especially if you have lots of images!
Fortunately, WordPress plugins such as reGenerate Thumbnails Advanced, WordPress Real Thumbnail Generator and others can do the heavy lifting for you.
What Type of Featured Image Should You Use?
The short answer is, the highest quality image you can that tells the story you want it to tell.
The longer answer needs a little more explanation.
In our opinion, a featured image should be:
- Original: Original images work best in most situations. Stock images are fine if you can’t make your own, but uniqueness gets attention.
- High quality: We recommend using the highest quality images you can. Optimize them so they don’t slow down load times though.
- Impactful: Whether it’s color, the subject, text or something else, a featured image needs to attract eyeballs.
- Relevant: Featured images should be relevant to the content otherwise there can be a disconnect between the two.
- Optimized for SEO as well as speed: Use optimized image names and alt text to help rank.
- Shareable: Ideally, a featured image should work as well on social media as in WordPress.
Depending on the site you’re posting the image on, branding them consistently will also help.
How To Optimize Featured Images for Search
We just mentioned SEO as something we consider useful for featured images.
As search is so important, let’s expand on that a little.
1. Use SEO-Friendly Alt Text
Alt text is there to help screen readers understand the image and for those times when the image doesn’t load properly.
Alt text also helps search engines understand the image and potentially add it to search results.
It’s good practice to include target keywords in alt text if they fit naturally, but don’t force them.
2. Use the Right File Name
It’s also good practice to include keywords within your image file names.
Rather than ‘image10102024.jpg’, renaming it to ‘whitenikeairjordans.jpg’ makes it easier for you to manage but also adds a tiny bit of SEO benefit.
3. Optimize Images for Speed
We have mentioned optimization a couple of times now and for good reason.
The higher the image quality the larger the file size, which can slow down page load times.
Speed is such an important factor in SEO and visitor satisfaction that we cannot stress enough how important image optimization is.
WordPress Featured Image Best Practices
Here are a few additional best practices to consider when creating the ideal WordPress featured image.
- Use the right dimensions: Choose an image dimension and orientation that looks good both as a featured image and on social media.
- Be consistent: If you brand images, keep the design, colors, size, typography and logo consistent to help build authority.
- Choose images carefully: Use images that are relevant, help tell the story, attract attention and deliver a visual impact.
- Use the right image format: Different image formats work best for different types of image. Think JPG, PNG, WebP and others.
- Be aware of copyright: There are lots of royalty free image websites out there. Make sure you’re using the right license type.
- Test images before publishing: Once your page or post is ready, preview it on different screen sizes before publishing and test afterwards, just to make sure.
While this post is about featured images, it’s also relevant to post images, product images or any type of image!
WordPress Featured Image Sizes
So that’s most of what you need to know about WordPress featured images.
Considering how much they can influence the success of a post or page, we recommend spending as much time on your images as you do on your content.
Your visitors will surely thank you for it!
Over to you. How do you format your featured images? How do you create them? Tell us all about it in the comments below!
Pratik Chaskar holds the pivotal role of CTO at Brainstorm Force, serving as the backbone of the company. Renowned for his organizational skills, strategic thinking, problem-solving attitude, and expertise in leading and executing plans, Pratik plays a crucial role in the BSF’s technological landscape.
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Thanks for this professional article.
Although we can resize the images ourselves in Settings > Media.
But the article doesn’t give multiple specific values.
Could you please tell me, in astra or most themes, what should be the size of the images set in Settings > Media?
“While different themes have different featured image sizes, we recommend going with an image size of 1200 pixels by 628 pixels if you want to play it safe.”
If you want to keep it simple I would just upload and image 1200×628. If you want to get complicated create a new feature image size 2x as large.
“For a post’s featured image, you can add the custom image size using the_post_thumbnail() function in the theme template file.”
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
the_post_thumbnail( ‘your-custom-size’ );
}
Can you write or update this guide on featured images for those using your Astra Theme?
Which theme template file are we supposed to change in Astra? The only one I can find is under inc/blog/blog.php on line 219
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {$post_featured_data = '';
$post_featured_data .= get_the_post_thumbnail();
$post_featured_data .= '';
} else {
Is it this? This seems overly complicated given how much you’re emphasising the importance of featured images and optimisaton.
Also, in the intro, it mentions you’ll address “How do I change the default featured image?”. Can you update this article to answer this? Particularly for Astra Theme and adding a fallback image option.
Thanks.
Hi, I’m using the Astra Starter template (Natural) and have added a blog….I’m using Beaver Builder as well. My problem is the image sizes (height) are all different. I have tried resizing them to be 630px in height but they are all rendering different. I have read your article on image sizes but nothing seems to change. Many thanks – Kaz