Is there any way to add "featured image" capability to a self-hosted Wordpress site without CSS? Is there really no plug-in?
Background: As part of my business website, I have a blog (with about 10 years' worth of posts). A number of years ago, I did a trade with a friend – I edited her book, her husband would be my webmaster (as I was set to overhaul my site). I did the editing, he moved my site to Wordpress and made a few tweaks in advance of the big overhaul. Then my friend and her husband got divorced, he stopped doing web design, and I've got a ton of credit with him I really can't use. (This isn't a threaten-to-sue situation; it's more, I'm not going to add to this guy's agony.)
Problem: I'm pretty handy with Wordpress and HTML for updating pages and posts. My sole problem is that he designed the theme for me without any support for featured images. So, even though I always want my first image in a post to be the image shared via social media, this is hit-or-miss, and more so on FB than Twitter. 90% of the time, Facebook lets me fiddle with the images -- delete the default image and add a different one -- but some days, like today, it will only allow a carousel of images. I can use theirs, the carousel that includes mine, or no image at all. If I use the Facebook Open Graph debugger, I can see that the og:image lists one of the other images (invariably the least interesting one in the post), but all the "scraping" in the world doesn't change which og:image is used, and there endeth my comprehension.
I tried adding a plug-in which claimed to always use your first image as the featured image, but it didn't do anything. (And yes, I know how to install and use plug-ins.)
Question: With all my research, there are only two solutions I can find for not having featured image built into my theme. 1) I can play with CSS per the end of this post, or 2) hire someone for this fiddly thing, or 3) I can swap All-In-One SEO for Yoast SEO, per this t utorial, as apparently Yoast has a workaround (but then I have to sit down and learn a new skill set for that).
Am I missing something? I don't really want to learn CSS or mess up my site or pay much to fix this one annoying little thing. 99% of the time, Wordpress has a plugin that fixes far more exotic problems, but this fairly obvious thing seems impossible. (Why don't ALL themes have featured image support? Why wouldn't everyone want to control which photo represents the blog when shared?)
You might ask, why not just ignore it and not worry about it? But there's a dramatic difference in the number of hits/clicks/likes on my FB business page when there's the right photo vs. the wrong one or the carousel. Like 500 vs. 10 in the first few hours.
You are not my web designer, but if you were, what would you tell me to do, particularly for the near-term? Thanks!
Source:
Wordpress wants my featured image to be my sad, sad face
0 comments:
Post a Comment