Adding a Featured Image to WordPress Posts

Adding a featured image to a WordPress post is really quite simple, and makes your posts to Facebook and other social media much more attractive and eye-catching.

A blog post WITHOUT a featured image will appear like this in your Facebook feed:

A blog post WITH a featured image will appear like this in your Facebook feed:

So how do you take your posts from scroll-over status to stop-the-feed-I-need-to-see-this status? It’s easy. When composing a new blog post most of the important settings for your blog such as who can see them, what category the post will be in, and which tags you will be using are in a column to the right of your composition area. At the very bottom of that column, under “Tags,” you will see “Featured Image”:

Clicking on the link will take you to your media library where you can either choose an existing photo or add a new one. Once you have chosen your photo, it will appear in the column, and will post with your blog when you post it to Facebook.

The above illustrations were done in a WordPress.org site, but it works the same way in WordPress.com, even though it looks slightly different. Like this:

Click Featured Image, followed by Set Featured Image:

Choose your image, and it will appear in the column, like this:

One thing to keep in mind, some themes and settings work so that the featured image is automatically placed at the top of the page when you go to the blog itself or when you view it in your blog feed. This can be a little annoying if you have the image in the body of the blog because you see the picture twice as you’re scrolling through your feed. It seems a little redundant. I was able to prevent this by going to Appearance (left hand column)>Customize,>Posts and Pages, and then clicking on “Hide featured image from top of posts.”

Also, from time-to-time I have experienced issues with the featured image NOT posting to Facebook if I added it to the blog post AFTER publishing. I’m not sure what causes this, so I always make adding that image part of my pre-publishing “regime,” just like adding the category and tags.

Hope that helps! It’s quick, easy, and makes your Facebook blog posts more visible.