How to Edit or Generate your website thumbnails with these free WordPress plugins

What is a thumbnail?

Usually, it is a small version of the featured image you selected for a specific post.

The thumbnail appears, along with the first lines of your posts, on the blog page and in the archives.

It can, for example, also appear in the sidebar if the “latest posts” widget is displayed or at the end of your articles, where there are links to related content.

Being a thumbnail of a larger image, thumbnails don’t always look aesthetically beautiful.

Sometimes, they are resized disproportionately or cut in the wrong place.

Precisely for this reason, today we will see how to edit thumbnails using plugins, so that they are always displayed at their best.

The best WordPress plugins to edit thumbnails

Before showing you two useful plugins to customize the thumbnails of your site, are you sure that what you need is not already present in the WordPress features?

Sometimes you are looking for plugins to perform very simple functions that are already provided without the need to install additional features.

If you just want to change the default thumbnail size, go to Settings> Media .

Here you will find an item called “Thumbnail size” where you can enter width and height in pixels for your thumbnails.

If, on the other hand, you need something more, then read on.

Crop-Thumbnails

Crop-Thumbnails

The Crop-Thumbnails plugin is foredit thumbnailson your site, manually cropping them.

Find the general plugin options in Settings> Crop-Thumbnails .

You will find different post formats (Articles, Pages, etc.) and for each of them you can choose whether to hide the Crop-Thumbnail button in the featured image.

Then, navigate to the Media Library, select the image you want to edit and click on the Crop-Thumbnail button.

Select the part of the image to keep by dragging and resizing the square in the right image.

crop thumbnail

When satisfied, click Save Crop to make your changes take effect.

Hence, this plugin allows you to select exactly which part of the image to show in the thumbnail.

Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails

This plugin is useful in case your thumbnails have some problems, for example when you change themes or after setting custom sizes in your library.

Regenerate Thumbnails creates the missing thumbnails.

Go to the Media Library, choose the image for which to recreate the thumbnails and click Regenerate the thumbnail.

You’ll see a list of existing thumbnails, including those that are no longer needed because they were created from plugins or themes that are no longer active.

By selecting the Regenerate button , you will be able to delete unused thumbnails and create the correct ones for your website.

Conclusion

In this short guide we have seen two useful tools for edit the thumbnails of your WordPress site, resizing and cropping them to your liking or adapting them to your new theme.

Especially if you find the blog on the homepage of your site , don’t neglect this aspect!

A blog with beautiful images, cropped to the right point, will certainly make a more beautiful figure than a site with images all “busted”.

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