Importance of Using Featured Images in WordPress

Featured images came to WordPress version 2.9 first. The featured image allows you to display image that is related with your blog post in different parts of your theme. It is a great feature introduced in WordPress making it different from traditional CMSs. Featured image in WordPress is a powerful tool to increase the visual presence of your website. There are lot of wordpress resources for beginners but this feature had not spread widely among the bloggers. But before getting deeper in it, first of all let us discuss what featured image is, giving a good description.

What is Featured Image?

The basic idea behind the Featured Image in WordPress is that most of the bloggers wants to display picture related to the blog post on the home page of their site. It is common with magazine styled themes in which, images are not used with actual post, but are used with text snippets. But it required a lot of work for the user to do. A single post in this case might require multiple image sizes. But by using Featured Image, you just need to choose a thumbnail that you want to display on front page. Now the WordPress will automatically resize the image according to the need of the page. So, it is a powerful feature to simply images of your site and increases your web presence.

Why Featured Image is underused?

The featured image had not been used by most of the bloggers to their full. This is because of the reason that the use of this feature requires compatible theme. But this had been changing as the WordPress is upgrading itself day by day. Now the feature of Featured Image is supported by the most basic theme of WordPress- Twenty Ten. But still most of the themes don’t support this feature. But nowadays, the new themes have pre-built support for featured images. Even most of them have featured image option in the theme itself.

Why to use Featured Image in WordPress?

• This feature allows the WordPress user to add image in a structured way than it had been added to the post body. The theme can use the featured image to give a good and consistent HTML output.
• The featured image can be easily separated from images referenced in the posts of your blog.
• One of the most common uses of setting featured image is to highlight the image for displaying it with excerpts.
• The featured image if added to the page or blog post is very important for a quality blogging and better SEO results.

There are three important parts of in every post- the title, the content of the post and featured image. Many bloggers concentrates more on title and content of the post but forget about the featured image which is equally important as the post title and post content. The featured image is viewed by many people. This image is displayed next to the post title and on the blog page. It is also displayed on social media websites, if you share your blog posts there.

WordPress had been gifted with most powerful tool- Featured Image over last few years. The important thing to see about this tool will be watching the wordpress development, so that this tool can be used efficiently in WordPress. So, the bloggers must familiarize themselves with this amazing feature and start taking the benefits, it gives to the bloggers.