Most WordPress sites rely heavily on setting a featured image. These are typically displayed at the top of the post itself. And are also used in navigational areas such as category pages.
Depending on the theme you are using or the plugins installed, featured images may also appear in image sliders or lists of related posts.
In short, unless your blog is deliberately very text based, featured images are important.
Which can be a bit of pain sometimes. You’ve just finished writing a magnificent blog post full of rich vital information. Then you realise you don’t have an image suitable for the featured image. What do you do? Delay your post until you’ve found something suitable or created one yourself? Wait for a few days until you can commission someone to create one for you? Or just publish it and leave it without?
None of these are ideal.
Which is why we created a neat little WordPress plugin that sets a random featured image when you publish. If you don’t add one yourself that is.
It works from an initial pool of images that you do need to set up yourself. This is quick and easy though. Just make sure you use images relevant to the topic of your blog.
You can then either leave the random image in place because it’s good enough. Or you can come back when you have more time (or when the designer delivers the final image) and set the new image instead.
It makes life a lot easier when you just want to get a blog post out there and published. You don’t have to leave it sat in your drafts while you wrestle with Photoshop for a few hours. It means you can publish, and share on Facebook (or wherever) and the share won’t look rubbish because there’s no image.