It’s been said a thousand times that WordPress is the best platform when it comes to Blogging. Moreover if you have some coding knowledge (Basic PHP, HTML & CSS) then your blog will certainly rock.
Last week I posted few ways to Increase the PHP Memory Limit in WordPress. Today I thought of posting few tips to Display Thumbnails in your WordPress excerpts.
In simple terms the word ‘excerpt means – a shorter version of an entire blog post.
It’s a known fact that images speak much more than words, So placing a thumbnail on the main page of your blog is much essential for both SEO as well as to increase the CTR. If you style it well, then you’ll certainly make a few of your site visitors stick on your site for a longer period. I’ll not be making a long list all the available methods, Instead I will be giving out a couple of methods to display Thumbnails on the main page of your blog.
Manually adding Thumbnails
WordPress 2.9 came out with an effective feature of Featured Images. It allows you to upload images which will help you in displaying Thumbnails in your Post Excerpts. But this feature is not activated by default in most of the WordPress themes. So you need to first activate it by adding a two-line code in your functions.php file present in your theme’s Directory.
if ( function_exists( ‘add_theme_support’ ) )
add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ );
Now open the Index.php file present in your theme’s Directory & add the code just below the Post Excerpt.
<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
This code will display Thumbnails on your Index page.
Using Plugins to Display Post Thumbnails
If you are not a coder, please do not mess with php; it can bring your site down very quickly. So I would recommend you to make use of plugins to do the job for you.
Yes, using plugins certainly increases your site’s memory usage, but you need to bear with that aspect as it does the job for you without much efforts from your side. Out of the many Thumbnail plugins; I found ‘Thumbnail For Excerpts’ to be the most promising out there. So go ahead and Download Thumbnail For Excerpts.
In case you face any difficulty, despite of trying the above two methods, feel free to submit your query as a Comment.
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Have you faced problems when you first setup your blog for post thumbnails ? Which method did you use ??