Learn how to create and manage a "Featured Image" for your blog posts to enhance visitor engagement. This article also provides information about web development and design courses in NYC that empower you with ultimate control over your WordPress site.
Key Insights
- The "Featured Image" is a large image placed above the blog post that, along with the title, entices visitors to read the content.
- This feature is crucial for themes where only sections of your post are visible or if "Read More" tags are added to posts.
- The "Featured Image" is enabled by selecting this option from the settings menu and can be uploaded from the media library.
- Blog posts with a featured image are likely to attract more visitor engagement and improve the overall aesthetic of the blog roll.
- The appearance of the featured image can vary based on the selected theme and may need adjustment accordingly.
- For advanced control over WordPress sites, one can consider enrolling in web development and design courses in NYC.
Featured Image Best Practices
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Set Per Post
Document panel > Featured Image > Set.
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Aspect Ratio
Theme dictates ratio — typically 16:9 or 4:3.
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Alt Text
Describe the image for accessibility.
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Use in Theme
Themes display featured images on archives, social shares.
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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