WordPress featured image not showing: symptom, cause and fix

Symptom, cause and fix in one table

Below, each symptom in turn. Pick yours and skip the rest.

Posts on the blog page without an image

This is the most common case and the simplest. The post has no image set, so the theme has nothing to show. An image placed in the post content doesn't count. The featured image is a separate field.

These gaps usually appear after importing from another platform, or in old posts written before the theme started showing thumbnails. With a few posts you'll fix them by hand. With 150 posts, just finding the gaps takes a lot of clicking.

By hand, you do it like this:

1. Open Posts → All Posts and open a post without an image.
2. In the post settings panel on the right, find the Featured image section.
3. Choose an image from the Media Library. Ideally one that's already in the post content.
4. Check whether the image has alt text and add it if it's missing. Our guide to alt text in WordPress explains how to write it.
5. Save the post and check the blog page in a private window.

The image is set, but you can't see it on the page

In that case the theme decides. In block themes, the post list is built by a template in Appearance → Editor. If the archive or blog page template has no Featured Image block, there won't be any images, even though they're set. In classic themes this is controlled by theme options, most often in Appearance → Customize.

Sometimes the theme doesn't support images for a given content type at all. The WordPress documentation on featured images describes this: the theme has to declare support, otherwise the field won't appear in the editor. Adding it means changing theme files, so leave it to the theme author or whoever looks after the site.

Before you ask anyone, check the editor preferences. The three-dot menu in the top right corner of the editor has a Preferences window with a list of panels. The image panel may simply have been switched off.

Blurry or badly cropped thumbnails

When you upload an image, WordPress creates several cropped versions in the sizes set in your settings and by the theme. After a theme change, old images keep the old sizes, and the new theme stretches them or crops them differently. The fix is to regenerate the thumbnails, for example with the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. On a large library this puts load on the server, so it's better if the person who looks after the site does it.

In future, upload landscape images with the important part in the middle. That way, any crop keeps something of it.

A share with no image or the wrong one

Facebook and LinkedIn take the image from a hidden tag on the page. The SEO plugin writes it, usually in this order: an image set by hand in its fields, then the featured image, then an image from the content. Yoast describes the order and recommended sizes.

If the post has an image but the share shows a different one, check the SEO plugin's social fields on that post. If you changed the image after the first share, the social site may remember the old version. In that case, use the site's own link preview refresh tool.

How the chat finds gaps and sets images in batches

The TellMyShop plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce checks images already in the free TellMyShop Free version. Your chat (Claude or ChatGPT) finds posts, pages and products without a featured image. The site review adds them to the fix plan, alongside other gaps we describe in our post on the WordPress SEO audit. For a single page, the chat also checks whether a share will get an image.

In TellMyShop Pro the chat sets, changes or removes images on up to 50 posts, pages or products at once. It takes the image from the Media Library or uploads it from a public address, up to 15 MB, with alt text and a file name straight away. It doesn't create graphics. It matches images you already have by file name, title and the post the image was uploaded to.