Setting Up Feature Images

Feature images are crucial for posts because they visually represent your content, making it more appealing and engaging to readers. Your images serve as a preview, grabbing attention and encouraging clicks, especially on social media and blog feeds.

Feature images also improve the overall aesthetics of a site, enhance branding, and contribute to SEO by adding another layer of metadata for search engines to index, ultimately helping boost visibility and traffic.

All of our themes use featured images to display blog posts. For each blog post to appear in your categories, you must have a featured image set. Let’s get started:

Choosing the Correct Image

To avoid pixelation, use high-resolution images (at least 1200px wide) that are closely related to the content of your post. Feature images set at 1200px wide are now the go-to and are recommended by Google.

WordPress’s most commonly used image formats are JPEGs, PNG, Wepb, and AVIF.

Plugins such as WP Smush or ShortPixel Image Optimizer can optimize your images. However, if your website uses AVIF or WebP images, you will not need to use an image optimization plugin.

Optimizing Images

If you are using PNG for your feature images, you will need to optimize them to reduce loading times; you can do this by using TinyPNG.

To convert JPEG, PNG, PDF images, and WebP into AVIF, we use AVIF Studio—Image Editor With AVIF Support. This is a Chrome Extension app with many design features, such as Background Remover, SVG Editor, Presentation Maker, Photo Collage Maker, and more. They also have a website AVIFStudio, pin to your menubar since you’ll be using it every day.

Why use AVIF? 

AVIF can reduce a PNG from 999KB to 30KB or less with no loss of quality. Therefore, it makes sense to use this format because it will reduce page loading times, especially if you have many images on your website, such as recipe and photography websites that are prone to a high volume of images.

There are 3 drawbacks to using AVIF:

1. It isn’t viewable on Windows 10 and some Windows 11. To fix this, go to Microsoft Store and search AV1 Video Extension. After downloading it, all your AVIF files should be viewable.
2. It takes forever to convert so you have 2 choices: 1. Go grab a coffee, by the time you come back to your PC it may have converted. 2. Use WebP instead.
3. Use WP Smush to convert your images after uploading them. For this to work, your images will need to be uploading in JPG or PNG format; preferably JPG because it’s lightweight.

Setting Feature Images in WordPress

NOTE: With Kadence, you can choose images from Pexels. We suggest choosing an image you like, then downloading it to your PC to resize it, and uploading it as an AVIF or WebP.

Changing Existing Feature Images

If a post already has a featured image set, the image will be prominently displayed in the post editor section in the right-hand sidebar. To change the image, simply hover over the existing image and click “Replace” using the steps mentioned above.

Lots Of Posts With No Feature Images

If your website has many posts without any Featured Images set, don’t worry! You don’t have to add them all manually.

To get started, use the Auto Post Thumbnail plugin; simply install and activate it. You can also download the plugin from Creative Motion. After activation, navigate to Settings > Auto Post Thumbnails and click on Generate Thumbnails. Do not leave the page until it reaches 100% completion.

This plugin will save you a lot of time. It effortlessly chooses the first image in each post and assigns it as the Featured Image. It could also bide you time should you want to change all your feature images.

NOTE: This plugin only works with images that are already in your WordPress media library.

Image SEO Best Practices

It is also good practice to set up Feature Images on your pages as well, this can be done by following the same principles above.

NOTE: If some of these options are unavailable, you most likely do not have the Kadence Pro installed.