During your blogger’s life, you have to know how to work with images. The most important picture is called a hero image in WordPress also known as a Featured image. You can find this picture on the top of the page. The featured image also works as a thumbnail of the posts in WordPress and on the social networks. It is a necessary part of the blog content. In this article, we will present the complete guide about images in WordPress. Our today’s topic is the size and resolution of images in WordPress.

What is the right size of images in WordPress?

You can meet two types of size during the work with images. The first one describes the file size that means the physical size of the file on your hard drive or web storage. The other one indicates the size of the image on the screen, which is also called a resolution. The resolution the number of pixels of an image. This number shows the height and the width of the image. If you need to change the resolution, you can use for example the WordPress editor. Read more about how to edit pictures in WordPress. Higher resolution means larger file size. Size of the image also depends on the file type. The most popular file sizes are JPEG, GIF, PNG, and ICO.

Recommended parameters for images in WordPress

The file size is one of the most important indicators of a website speed. The recommended size of a larger image is about 60-100K. The thumbnails should be smaller, around 30K. It is very important to find a compromise between the resolution (the quality) and the file size.

File format

An ideal format for photos is JPEG. Unfortunately it has a high compression, which means it removes details from the picture. You should be careful during the compression to create a useful photo with small file size. PNG is better for vector graphics such as logos etc. It is also great for the work with transparency. ICO is a unique format for favicons of the websites.

Image resolution

The recommended resolution for the hero image is 1200×630 px. The image should not interfere with the corners because of crops to thumbnails for social media and the differences among the size of the template’s borders. That means the central part of the image should be about 1110×610 px. The thumbnail should have the resolution about 360×240 px. The recommended width of the larger image in the lightbox is 1280 px.

WordPress has a default width of a thumbnail of 150 px. The medium version of image is 300 px and the large image has 1024 px. The instructions about the default settings changes you can find in your article about the featured images. All of these resolutions should be in 72 DPI because it is highest resolution of a monitor. Other DPIs will be compressed.

If you would like to know more about the work with images in WordPress you can visit our blog or ask our team for any advice.