Reasons to Have a Good Featured Image on Your Post  

Featured images are crucial to reader engagement on your blog and via social networks. You don’t need an image over 100×100 pixels to attract attention, although different platforms have varying image size requirements. A featured image on a post can inspire visitors to your homepage to give your blog posts a look and spend more time on your site. 

A good featured image on your social media can also help increase the traffic to your blog. It can make your post viral if it’s particularly memorable. 

Getting a featured image

Your image should be relevant to your post. Ideally, it should communicate the message of your post clearly. You can take a picture yourself or use a free one with a Creative Commons license. You can use a program like PowerPoint if you want a branded image. 

Use visually appealing colors and patterns when you design a featured image. All of the action must be contained within the frame. Most content management systems, like WordPress, have settings to add a featured image automatically. 

WordPress featured image

A featured image in WordPress is the main image of your post. Usually, it is seen next to the post’s heading on your social media and homepage.  

Featured images help increase pageviews apart from growing user engagement. Social networks and search engines can use and show them in news feeds and search results. Bloggers often use featured images for their posts, but they can also be set for custom posts and pages. 

Support for images on WordPress themes

The vast majority of WordPress themes have integrated support for featured images. They can be seen across various areas of your site. 

Authors of themes add featured image support by adding a snippet of code to the functions.php file. They also determine the style and size of the images and how they will be displayed. Many photography themes demonstrate the creative uses of featured images. WordPress-powered entertainment and news websites have featured images on the front page for each article.

How to add a featured image

In WordPress, you can add a featured image by going to the Post Edit screen and clicking on the ‘Set featured image’ link. You can set a default image when there is no image. Create a default image to use as a backup if that feature happens to be missing from your website’s theme. 

Those who run multi-author blogs can have a featured image added to each post. The image can be hidden on some posts. 

Where to find good images

Choose the images to use on your website carefully. You can’t use images that are copyright-protected because you can be held liable under copyright laws. The good news is that there are a few excellent free resources you can use. They include: 

• Unsplash
• New Old Stock, a collection of vintage photographs from public archives.
• Negative Space
• Pixabay 
• Freepiks 
• Pexels
• Shutterstock offers a few free images

Featured images vs. cover images

You use cover images in the content area of your pages or posts. Usually, people use them to separate different sections of a long post or page. The featured image is displayed by or before the content, not inside the post. 

Featured images vs. thumbnail

“Thumbnail” and “featured image” are used interchangeably. The official term is Featured image. The WordPress Codex page on featured images is titled “Post Thumbnails.” However, specialists will agree that ‘featured image’ is a more suitable term given the purpose of these images. The term ‘thumbnail’ doesn’t describe in sufficient detail how you intend the image to represent your post’s contents.