Have you ever visited a website that doesn’t have any images on? It would be horrible, right?
No matter what topics your site is covering or what themes you’re using, such as cars, makeups, travels, or even plugins, you still need the powerful support from images. Especially, a featured image for every single post. Even though your content is well written and delivers useful information, visitors will feel less interested, and even lost without any image illustrations.
In fact, images are way more necessary for the success of a website than you might think. To understand more about what a featured image is and why it is significant to protect it, this article will walk you through all.
- What Is a Featured Image?
- Why Is a Featured Image Essential?
- Why Is It Necessary to Protect Featured Images?
- How to Protect Featured Images
What Is a Featured Image?
Like other images that you uploaded on your WordPress, featured images are also media files. However, its mission is more special than other regular images inside your posts.
A featured image acts as a thumbnail of your post. It covers the main idea that your post is talking about. By creating or selecting a featured image for your post, you’re setting the overall review and the tone for your story.
Featured images displayed on a website will be varied depending on the theme you are using. Hence, a featured image can be placed above or below the post title. But mostly, the ideal featured image should appear on top of every single post, page and custom post type.
Why Is a Featured Image Essential?
First impressions have the ability to make or break a business. People often say “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but it’s easier said than done. When users visit your website, they tend to click on posts that have featured images, especially beautiful and attractive ones.
Plus, a concise image assists in spreading your posts farther. Whenever you intend to share your post via social media, it’d be better to have a featured image so that readers can guess the basic idea of your posts.
In case your post is informative but doesn’t contain any pictures, having a good featured image will be the best saving idea. The featured images support plain posts and make them interesting enough for users to click on to continue reading.
Later on, you want to see all your archived posts, but you have a long list of them without any featured images to distinguish. It would be a nightmare. With different featured images for different posts, you can save more time to manage your posts later.
Why Is It Necessary to Protect Featured Images?
Featured images play an essential role in the effectiveness of your posts and pages. Sometimes, it’s hard to find or design a good featured image that can precisely tell the whole meaning of your post.
Therefore, you definitely don’t want all the hard work you put on your featured images to be stolen and used illegally. It’s crucial to know how to protect your featured images as well as media files on your WordPress site.
How to Protect Featured Images?
As mentioned above, featured images are similar to other media files. Therefore, featured images protection follows the same process as securing your WordPress media files.
As usual, WordPress provides plenty of plugins whenever you want to have some extra functionalities for your site. In this case, it will be helpful if you have a file protection plugin.
Prevent Direct Access Gold is recognized as one of the most powerful plugins on WordPress that can secure your files completely. The plugin protects any files uploaded to the media library such as images, videos, pdf, and so on.
The plugin allows only logged-in users or paid members to be able to access your protected files. As a result, you can filter a certain number of uninvited guests coming to your site with bad intentions.
This function proves handy when you are providing a private or membership site. You’re able to hide your important files to the public, but still, let your members access those files freely.
When someone has the original link to your featured images or media files in general, you don’t have to worry so much. Once the files are shielded, any unauthorized access will be redirected to the 404 error page. Your files now are untouchable.
In Conclusion
Choosing a good featured image is one of the essential steps you need to think about before publishing any post. You need to make sure the featured image is consistent with the content that it illustrates. And consider changing or update your theme if needed since different themes will display featured images in different ways. You just need to figure out which one is more effective and suits your style.
Remember to treat your featured images as important as other media files. Since featured images act as a representative of your post, protecting it well is a good way to support your site’s performance.
Prevent Direct Access Gold gives you a full package of media file protection. You won’t need to worry about unauthorized access, uninvited guests, and file stealing without permission.
Don’t forget to leave your thoughts about featured image protection in the comment section below. And feel free to ask if you have any questions.
