How to Fix Featured Image Not Showing in WordPress (6 Ways)
As a seasoned WordPress expert with over 15 years of experience, I’ve seen my fair share of website woes. One of the most common issues that pops up is the dreaded “missing featured image.” This isn’t just a cosmetic problem; it can significantly impact your website’s performance and user experience.
Featured images, those captivating visuals that grace your blog posts and represent your content across your website, are essential for grabbing attention, boosting click-through rates, and enhancing overall engagement. When they’re missing, it can leave your website feeling incomplete and uninviting.
Don’t worry! In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through the most common reasons why featured images might disappear and provide step-by-step solutions to get them back in action. You’ll be back to showcasing stunning visuals on your WordPress site in no time.
Why Aren’t My Featured Images Showing Up?
Before we dive into the fixes, let’s understand why your featured images might be playing hide-and-seek. Featured images appear on your blog post list page and sometimes on the post’s header. Similar to YouTube thumbnails, the goal of the featured image is to increase pageviews and user engagement.
Featured images are also used to represent individual articles in recent posts and archive and search pages. Beyond that, the style of your featured images sets the tone for the rest of your blog post.
Just about all WordPress themes allow you to upload featured images and give you the ability to display them across different areas of your site, such as the sidebar menu or the main content area.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the most common culprits:
- File Size Issues: If your image is too large, it might be causing an HTTP error during upload. This is a common barrier for featured images.
- Plugin or Theme Conflicts: Certain plugins or themes can interfere with how featured images are displayed. This is often the case with image optimization plugins that include lazy loading functionality.
- Lazy Loading Problems: Lazy loading, a technique to improve website speed, can sometimes cause featured images to load slowly or not at all. Lazy loading plugins can treat featured images as normal photos and delay their loading.
- User Permissions: If you’re not the website owner, you might not have the necessary permissions to upload or view featured images.
- Theme Settings: Some themes require manual setup to display featured images. Check your theme settings for any relevant options.
How to Fix Featured Images Not Showing in WordPress
Now that you know the possible culprits, let’s get down to business and fix those missing featured images. Here are six effective solutions you can try:
1. Fix the HTTP Error When Uploading a Featured Image
If you try uploading a featured image with a large file size, you may get the vague ‘HTTP error’ message. Often, this means that the image file is too large or that you need to increase your site’s memory limit to allow for larger uploads to your WordPress site.
Here are two main ways to fix this problem:
- Decrease the image file size.
If size is an issue, you may want to switch to the WebP, JPEG, or PNG image format. JPEG is a compressed file format that slightly reduces image quality to significantly reduce it to a smaller file size, and WebP files are very small to begin with.
You can compress the file size using an image compression tool such as TinyPNG or JPGmini. Simply upload the image to the tool, and then you can download the compressed version of the file.
For more information, take a look at our guide on how to optimize images for web performance without losing quality.
- Increase the WordPress memory limit.
If you’ve already compressed the image size and are still dealing with the HTTP error, you might want to increase your WordPress memory limit. You could simply contact your current web hosting provider and request to expand your PHP limit or upgrade your hosting plan.
However, you can also change the PHP memory limit, which requires that you modify the wp-config.php or .htaccess files. In both cases, you will need an FTP client or File Manager.
For this method, it’s a good idea to use a plugin like WPCode, which allows you to add customizations without breaking your website. WPCode is the best code snippets plugin on the market, with over 2,000,000 million websites that use it to future-proof their website customizations with code snippets.
If you want to edit the .htaccess 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:
define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );For more details on how to increase your memory limit, check out our tutorial on how to fix WordPress memory-exhausted errors to increase PHP memory.
2. Fix the Plugins or Themes
Some WordPress themes and plugins could be restricting the image from appearing.
While most WordPress themes automatically display your featured images, some require manual setup by the admin. In that case, you may need to check your WordPress theme settings or reach out to your theme’s support for help.
For more information, check out our ultimate guide on how to use WordPress Theme Customizer.
If the theme isn’t causing the issue, you can also check if your plugins are the primary culprit.
- Update All Plugins: Start by updating all of your plugins. Outdated plugins can cause conflicts and unexpected behavior.
- Deactivate and Reactivate Plugins: If updating plugins doesn’t fix the issue, deactivate all of your plugins and then reactivate them one by one. After each reactivation, check to see if the featured images are showing up properly. If the featured image fails to appear, you’ll know which plugin is causing the issue.
- Use the Health Check & Troubleshooting Plugin: This free plugin performs a series of checks to detect configuration and known errors in your plugins and themes. It can help pinpoint potential culprits.
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.
A faster website improves website rankings since search engines like Google consider speed to be an important ranking factor.
Basically, lazy loading stops the loading of images on a page until it comes into view on the screen. For example, the last image in a long blog post won’t have to load until the user actually scrolls down and reaches that image.
That said, lazy loading can cause issues with featured images since some lazy-loading plugins could treat featured images as normal photos. This could cause the featured image to load slowly or block it entirely from appearing on the recent posts list.
Also, some image optimization plugins will have lazy loading functionality as an add-on. Thus, you’ll want to check each plugin installed to see if this feature is enabled.
You may want to turn off the lazy loading feature in your plugins and clear the cache to see if it resolves the featured image problem.
Some plugins allow you to exclude certain photos from lazy loading. If that’s the case, you can disable this feature only for the first image of your blog posts so that you can still benefit from lazy loading without affecting your featured images.
You can easily disable code by customizing the code snippet with WPCode. First, you’ll need to head over to the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress dashboard.
Then, all you would do is copy and paste this PHP code into the ‘Code Preview’ box:
add_filter( 'wp_lazy_loading_enabled', '__return_false' );Make sure to also select ‘PHP Snippet’ as the ‘Code Type.’
Lastly, you’ll turn on the plugin so that it’s active and hit the ‘Save Snippet’ button.
For more details, please see our step-by-step tutorial on how to properly disable lazy load in WordPress.
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 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, you’ll want to 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 your chosen permissions.
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, you can go and edit your home page or any page that you’d like to have the featured images appear.
Then, let’s 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.
Simply click on the block and enable the ‘Display featured image’ option. Then, you’ll be able to 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.
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. Luckily, 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 and hit ‘Update.’ This should save all the changes you just made.
Then, you can head over to the Posts » All Posts page in your admin. On this page, you can see that the post thumbnails appear in a dedicated column.
Next, you may also want to read our post on how to automatically link featured images to posts in WordPress or our tutorial on how to add post thumbnails to your WordPress RSS feeds.
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.
For more details, read our guide on how to do basic image editing in WordPress.
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.
To do this, you can head over to Settings » Media from your WordPress admin area. Then, in the ‘Thumbnail’ size fields, go ahead and enter the new dimensions for your featured image.
For more detailed instructions, you can check out our beginner’s guide to WordPress image sizes.
Featured Images Not Appearing on Facebook
Featured images are pulled from WordPress and popular on social media platforms through Open Graph, 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 content’s title, description, and featured image.
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 to improve and optimize your website for higher search rankings.
Once activated, you can 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.
For more details, check out our guide on how to add Facebook open graph metadata in WordPress themes.
Conclusion
Featured images are an essential part of a visually appealing and engaging WordPress website. Don’t let missing featured images hold you back! Armed with this guide and its step-by-step solutions, you can tackle this common issue with confidence and ensure your images are showcased beautifully. Remember, a well-optimized website with captivating visuals can make all the difference in capturing attention and driving user engagement.
FAQs
Why are my featured images not showing up in my WordPress posts?
There are several reasons why your featured images might not be showing up. Common culprits include:
- File Size Issues: The image might be too large. Try compressing it.
- Plugin or Theme Conflicts: Check for conflicts with plugins or themes, especially those related to image optimization or lazy loading.
- Lazy Loading: Disable lazy loading for featured images or configure the plugin to exclude them.
- User Permissions: Make sure you have the necessary permissions to upload and display featured images.
- Theme Settings: Your theme might require manual setup to display featured images. Check your theme’s settings.
How do I fix a featured image HTTP error in WordPress?
An HTTP error during image upload usually indicates a file size issue. Try these solutions:
- Compress the Image: Use an online compression tool like TinyPNG or JPGmini to reduce the image size.
- Increase Memory Limit: You can increase the WordPress memory limit by modifying the wp-config.php or .htaccess file, or by contacting your web hosting provider.
How can I disable lazy loading for featured images in WordPress?
To disable lazy loading specifically for featured images, you can either:
- Use a Plugin: Some lazy loading plugins offer options to exclude specific images, including featured images. Configure the plugin accordingly.
- Add Custom Code: You can add custom code using a plugin like WPCode to disable lazy loading for all images, including featured images. Check for instructions on disabling lazy loading within your plugin documentation or find a code snippet online.
Can I change the size of my featured images in WordPress?
Yes, you can change the default size of featured images in WordPress. Go to Settings » Media and adjust the ‘Thumbnail’ size fields to your desired dimensions.
Why aren’t my featured images showing up on my blog page?
Featured images may not show up on your blog page if the theme doesn’t support displaying them. Edit your blog page, add the ‘Latest Posts’ block, and ensure the ‘Display featured image’ option is enabled. You can also adjust the featured image size and alignment to match your theme.
My featured images don’t appear on Facebook. Why?
Facebook uses Open Graph meta tags to display content from your website, including featured images. Use an SEO plugin like All in One SEO to enable Open Graph markup for your posts. This will ensure that your featured images are properly displayed when your content is shared on Facebook.
How do I make my featured images clickable in WordPress?
To make featured images clickable in WordPress, you’ll need to use custom code. You can use a plugin like WPCode to add code snippets that link the featured image to the post. Look for instructions within your theme’s documentation or search for a code snippet online.
What are the best image sizes for featured images in WordPress?
The optimal featured image size is 1200 x 687 pixels for rectangular images and 600 x 600 pixels for square images. These dimensions ensure your images display well across different devices and screen sizes.
Can I add featured images to my WordPress RSS feed?
Yes, you can add featured images to your WordPress RSS feed using a plugin like WPCode. Find a code snippet that enables this functionality and add it to your website.
What are the best image compression tools for WordPress?
There are several great image compression tools available for WordPress. Some popular choices include:
- TinyPNG: A free online tool that compresses JPEG and PNG images without losing quality.
- JPGmini: A free online tool that compresses JPEG images.
- ShortPixel: A WordPress plugin that offers image optimization and compression.
- Optimole: A WordPress plugin that provides image optimization, lazy loading, and WebP conversion.
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