Chuck Grimmett

Featured images are friction

Henrique commented on my “Just hit publish” post with:

As a designer, I feel that the Post Featured Image blocks me from writing much more than ‘normal’ people would think. I need time to conceive and prepare it—which makes quick daily posts impossible. Maybe I should review my blog template and get rid of them as a test to blog more.

I agree! I think I dropped my post template’s reliance on a featured image in 2021, when I noticed that coming up with an image was getting in the way of just hitting publish.

I still have featured images in some posts, but my post template works with or without them. Archive templates, too. The Site Editor makes this easy…if there is a featured image it populates, but if not no placeholder or markup gets loaded. I often have featured image on project-type posts like my woodworking, but the majority of my posts do not have one. This is a big difference from 10 years ago when every post had a featured image.

While we are on the topic of optional features of posts, I also think titles are optional. You don’t need titles on Twitter, Bluesky, or Mastodon, so why do you need them on your blog?

My standard post type does use titles, but my Micro and Likes post types do not. I like separating my streams of content that way, but that is personal preference.

It is worth noting that ma.tt and scripting.com both treat titles as optional. Featured images, too.

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Chuck Grimmett

Posted by Chuck Grimmett. Learn more on his About page.

Comments and Webmentions

5 responses to “Featured images are friction”

  • James
  1. Henrique Iamarino
    Henrique Iamarino

    That’s very good food for thought, thanks for mentioning and writing it, Chuck. As a theme designer, I’ll consider better Homepages in the future that treat Featured Images as optional because they really have an impact on acquiring the habit of publishing.

    Reply
  2. Chuck Grimmett
    Chuck Grimmett

    Design your blog templates to work with and without featured images. Featured images are friction and prevent you from Just Hitting Publish. https://cagrimmett.com/2026/01/12/featured-images-are-friction/

  3. Derek Hanson
    Derek Hanson

    True! Plus, the WordPress query loop doesn’t play well with mixes of images and no images if you have a grid layout. That’s still a limitation and why I’ve experimented with building a masonry query loop plugin.

    Now, I do think that you can close the gap with using something like Jetpack AI image generator, which I’ve been using successfully for a while now. It will automatically generate an image based on your content, and you can prompt and customize one to make it more to your liking.

    Reply
  4. Donncha
    Donncha

    I’ve gone back and forth on using featured images on my photoblog at inphotos.org over the years, but now I use them. I don’t actually display them though. I use them for my tag/category archives and displaying thumbnails for the posts. I even wrote a plugin to make the archive look like a gallery.

    For my photoblog, it irritated me that featured images were quite often cropped or stretched, so now I don’t display them at all if set.

    I rarely use them on odd.blog. Images are embedded and relate to the surrounding text.

    I’m glad you brought up titles too. I post a new photo every single day and before I got an AI to help, coming up with imaginative titles was a pain. I was jealous of other photographers who’d post an image with no text to Facebook or Instagram!

    Reply
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