How to Fix Featured Image Not Showing in WordPress
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Are you trying to figure out why WordPress won’t display your featured image?
Featured photos offer a preview of upcoming blog entries and pages to visitors. Thus, it can be annoying when they don’t show up on your website, and it will negatively impact your click-through rates right away.
Having said that, we’ll demonstrate in this post how to resolve WordPress’s inability to display featured photos, increasing the number of visits and interactions on your content.
Why Isn’t the Featured Image Showing in WordPress?
Featured photos show up on the list page of your blog posts and occasionally on the header of the post. The purpose of the featured image is to boost pageviews and user engagement, just like YouTube thumbnails do.
Additionally, individual articles are represented by featured photos in search, archive, and recent posts sections.
In addition, the featured image style dictates the overall tone of your blog post.
Featured photos can be uploaded and displayed on your website in various sections, such the main content area or the sidebar menu, with almost all WordPress themes.
You might want to look at our WordPress lesson on adding featured photos or post thumbnails while you’re debugging this problem. First, it’s crucial that you understand how to upload featured photos.
Erroneously uploading a cover picture instead of a featured image is a common mistake. Additionally, some themes automatically set the first image in a post to be the thumbnail for the post.
Keeping that in mind, let’s get started on fixing any possible problems that might arise. Please use our links to quickly go to the issue you’re currently experiencing.
1. Fix the HTTP Error When Uploading a Featured Image
You can receive the cryptic “HTTP error” warning if you attempt to submit a featured image that is enormous in size. This typically indicates that the picture file is too big or that you need to raise the RAM limit on your website in order to enable larger uploads to your WordPress website.
There are two basic approaches to solving this issue. Make sure to log out of WordPress and back in first, though. That will frequently enable you to post photos normally once more.
If not, then try one of the two following methods:
- Decrease the image file size.
- Increase the WordPress memory limit.
Let’s begin with the easier approach of reducing the size of your image file. You might choose to convert to the WebP, JPEG, or PNG image format if size is a concern. WebP files are small by nature, whereas JPEG is a compressed file format that somewhat lowers image quality in order to drastically reduce file size.
Next, you should use an image compression program like TinyPNG or JPGmini to reduce the file size.
You can obtain the file in a compressed format by just uploading the image to the tool.
It may be a good idea to raise your WordPress RAM limit if you have already compressed the picture size and the HTTP issue persists. You might just get in touch with your present web host and ask to upgrade your hosting package or increase your PHP limit.
Although you can also adjust the PHP memory limit, although doing so will need editing the.htaccess or wp-config.php files. You’ll need a File Manager or FTP client in both situations.
Using a plugin such as WPCode for this method is a fantastic idea as it lets you make changes to your website without affecting it. With over 2,000,000 million websites using it to future-proof their website customizations with code snippets, WPCode is the best code snippets plugin available.
If you want to edit the .htacess file, you will need to head over to the WordPress website’s root folder. Then, before the line that says ‘#END WORDPRESS,’ You can paste the following code:
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define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' ); |
2. Fix the Plugins or Themes
Some WordPress themes and plugins could be restricting the image from appearing.
While the majority of WordPress themes show your featured photos automatically, others need the admin to manually set them up. If so, you might need to contact your theme’s support team for assistance or check the WordPress theme options.
You may also see whether your plugins are the main offender if the theme isn’t the problem.
Update all of your plugins first.
Proceed to deactivate all of your plugins and then individually reactivate them if it doesn’t resolve the problem.
You can check to see if the featured images are likely to appear after every installation. You’ll be able to identify the problematic plugin if the featured picture stops working.
The Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin is another option. This free plugin runs a number of tests on your plugins and themes to find known faults and configuration issues.
Navigate to Tools » Site Health after activation. You’ll then receive a list of suggestions to help you enhance the security and functionality of WordPress.
As you can see, there are several installed plugins and themes that are out-of-date and inactive that need to be fixed. You may easily manage or update your plugins by clicking on the provided links.
3. Disable Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a feature that helps to improve your page speed and WordPress performance by quickly adding content and the visible area first.
Speed is a major ranking element for search engines like Google, therefore a speedier website gets higher rankings.
Lazy loading essentially prevents images from loading on a page until they are visible on the screen. For instance, a lengthy blog post’s final image won’t need to load until the user truly scrolls down to see it.
However, because some slow-loading plugins may regard featured images as regular photos, lazy loading might lead to problems with featured images. This might make it difficult for the featured image to load quickly or prevent it from showing up at all in the list of recent posts.
Additionally, as an add-on, some image optimization plugins will offer slow loading capabilities. As a result, you should verify that this feature is activated for each plugin that you have installed.
To check whether it fixes the feature image issue, you could want to disable the lazy loading function in your plugins and empty the cache.
With certain plugins, you can prevent specific images from loading slowly. If so, you may still take advantage of lazy loading without compromising your featured photos by disabling this option just for the first image in your blog entries.
By using WPCode to customize the code snippet, you may quickly disable code. You must first navigate to the WordPress dashboard’s Code Snippets > + Add Snippet page.
Then, all you would do is copy and paste this PHP code into the ‘Code Preview’ box:
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add_filter( 'wp_lazy_loading_enabled', '__return_false' ); |
This is how it should look when pasted.
Make sure to also select ‘PHP Snippet’ as the Code Type.
Lastly, make sure you turn on the plugin so that it’s active and hit the ‘Save Snippet’ button.
4. Change User Role Permissions to Allow for Featured Image Uploading
WordPress offers six default user roles to manage all the user’s access and actions on a site.
If you’re not the website owner, chances are you may not have the required user role to upload or view featured images.
All you have to do is to ensure that your user roles and permissions are set up properly.
An easy way to fix this issue is to use a plugin like User Role Editor so you can change roles and capabilities in one place.
Simply head over to Users » User Role Editor in your WordPress dashboard.
From here, you’ll select the role that you want to change under ‘Select Role’ and change its capabilities. In this case, we’ll choose the Author.
Then, using the ‘Quick filter’ option, look for ‘upload_files.’
Finally, just click the ‘Update’ button to make those changes.
This plugin also allows you to create new custom roles and give them access to permissions of your choosing.
5. Fix Featured Image Not Showing on a Blog Post Gallery Page
One of the best ways to use featured images is by showcasing your blog posts on your website’s homepage.
But what if the featured images don’t appear on the blog page?
To fix this issue, go and edit your home page or any page that you’d like to have the featured images appear.
Click on the ‘+’ icon and add the ‘Latest Posts’ block to the post on the page. From here, you’ll see links to your recent posts appear.
Click on the block and enable the ‘Display featured image’ option.
You can adjust the other settings, such as alignment and featured image size, to fit your page.
From here, your featured images should appear on your blog post gallery.
Here’s what it’ll look like once featured images show up.
6. Add Custom Code to Fix Featured Image Issues
Sometimes, post thumbnails aren’t clickable due to your current WordPress theme, which may not support that specific functionality.
Perhaps you want to add your featured images to RSS feeds or display the featured image in the list of posts in the admin area.
All of these things can be done with WPCode.
Upon activation, head over to Code Snippets » + Add Snippet. You’ll be sent to a library of pre-made custom code options.
Type’ featured image’ in the search bar so that you’ll see all the available custom code options for adding featured images to your website.
From here, just select your desired option.
For example, let’s say we want to add featured image columns to our WordPress admin dashboard. Just hover over the option and select ‘ Use Snippet.’
You’ll be then taken to a page where you can edit the snippet.
That said, the code is already pre-set, so you don’t have to tinker with the code or settings.
But if you need to enter the code manually, you can copy and paste from below:
add_filter( 'manage_posts_columns', function ( $columns ) {
// You can change this to any other position by changing 'title' to the name of the column you want to put it after.
$move_after = 'title';
$move_after_key = array_search( $move_after, array_keys( $columns ), true );
$first_columns = array_slice( $columns, 0, $move_after_key + 1 );
$last_columns = array_slice( $columns, $move_after_key + 1 );
return array_merge(
$first_columns,
array(
'featured_image' => __( 'Featured Image' ),
),
$last_columns
);
} );
add_action( 'manage_posts_custom_column', function ( $column ) {
if ( 'featured_image' === $column ) {
the_post_thumbnail( array( 300, 80 ) );
}
} );
Then, simply toggle the button to turn on the custom code snippet, then hit ‘Update.’
Then, you can head over to the Posts » All Posts page in your admin.
You should see that the post thumbnails appear.
Fixing the WordPress Featured Image Not Showing Up in the Right Size
Sometimes, your WordPress-featured image might not show up in the right size. It’s best to understand the best practices for featured images so that you can avoid issues in the first place.
Choosing the Right Graphics for Featured Images
The optimal featured image size for rectangular featured images is 1200 x 687 pixels. However, for themes that use square feature images, the best size is 600 x 600 pixels.
Changing the Default Image Sizes in WordPress
If the thumbnails in your blog appear way too small or big, you can manually edit the default image sizes.
WordPress will automatically create copies of your featured images to add them to different areas of your website, such as the blog page, archive pages, and homepage.
WordPress themes come with their own picture dimensions, but sometimes, you still might want to tinker with your featured image size.
Head over to Settings » Media from your WordPress admin area. Then, in the Thumbnail size fields, enter the new dimensions for your featured image.
Featured Images Not Appearing On Facebook
Featured images are pulled from WordPress and are popular on social media platforms through the use of Open Graph.
It’s a technology that allows social media sites like Facebook to understand and display content from a website. Open Graph meta tags can be added to individual posts and pages to control how they appear when shared. These tags include information such as the title, description, and featured image of the content.
The easiest way to ensure that all featured images appear on Facebook is to use All in One SEO. It is the best WordPress SEO plugin that helps to improve and optimize your website for higher search rankings.
Once activated, head over to All in One SEO » Social Networks. Then, under the Facebook tab, make sure you enable the option ‘Enable Open Graph Markup.’
This automatically displays a preview of your blog posts with a featured image and a short text excerpt.
