Adding Images in WordPress

Adding images to your site’s content helps to increase its visual appeal and, in most cases, gives your textual content deeper meaning. And though it may sound easy enough, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind if you want to maximize your images’ search engine optimization potential.

With this in mind, in this post, we’ll show you how you can go about adding images to your posts and pages in WordPress – the right way. Hopefully, by the time you’re done reading this post you’ll be able to add images to your own site. But before we begin, let’s quickly take a look at why you should add images to your site in the first place.

Let’s get started!

Why You Should Add Images to Your Website

The use of relevant, high-quality imagery in your site’s pages and posts can help you deliver more value to your readers with less. On top of this, it’s one of the easiest ways to give your content that extra oomph factor and draw in the reader’s attention.

Aside from these, here are a few more reasons why you might want to consider adding images to your WordPress website:

• Improves readability. Using images in blog posts and landing pages makes your content easier to read and skim through which, in turn, helps to reduce the bounce rate.
• Good for image search engines. Adding images to your website increases your site’s visibility in image search engines. And alt text descriptions and title tags give the bots some information about the image you’re using which helps improve your site’s ranking.
• Increases user engagement. Images attract more visitors to your site, give them reason to stay longer, and encourage them to interact with it.

As you can probably already tell, images make for a great addition to your website when implemented correctly. So, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at some different ways you can add images to your pages and posts.

How to Add Images in WordPress (2 Different Methods Explored)

The good news is that adding images in WordPress while keeping search engine optimization in mind is incredibly easy and you don’t need to be particularly technically inclined to do it yourself.

In this section, we’ll walk you through a quick tutorial on how you can add images into your WordPress posts and pages. All you need is back-end access to your site and a few images that you’d like to add.

Method 1: From the Media Library

If you have a few images uploaded to your site’s Media Library then inserting them into your posts and pages is a cakewalk. For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll show you how you can add images in blog posts.

Note: The same steps can be followed to insert images in WordPress pages.

Step 1: Position the Cursor

To get started, log in to your WordPress website and navigate to the post you’d like to insert an image into. Next, place your cursor in the text where you want the image to appear. For instance, if we wanted the image to appear between the first two paragraphs, we’d position it like this:

Step 2: Click the Add Media Button and Select the Image

Once that’s done, click the Add Media button to launch the Media Library’s interface.

Make sure you’re in the Insert Media section and in the Media Library tab. From there, select the image you’d like to insert into your post by simply clicking it.

The image that you select should have a blue checkbox appear in the top-right corner of the image’s thumbnail. In addition to this, the image’s Attachment Details should also be displayed in the pane on the right side of the Media Library’s interface.

Step 3: Enter the Image’s Attachment Details

The Attachment Details pane displays some important information about the image you’ve selected including a thumbnail of the image, its title, the date it was uploaded, and its size and dimensions. You should also see options to edit the image (Edit Image) and permanently delete the image from your Media Library (Delete Permanently) directly below the image’s details.

In addition to this, you can add some more information about the image to help search engine bots and the visually impaired understand it:

• Title. The title of the image goes here.
• Caption. The caption of the image shows up below the image after you’ve inserted it into your post or page.
• Alt Text. This stands for alternate text and is used to describe the image.
• Description. The description serves as a brief explanation of what is depicted in the image.

Step 4: Configure the Image’s Attachment Display Settings

Right below the Attachment Details section, you should see the Attachment Display Settings which allows you to configure three different options:

• Alignment. Allows you to decide where the image should be displayed in your content area. You can choose to align the image left, center, right, or none.
• Link To. This option lets you assign a URL to the image. Whenever a visitor clicks on the image, they will be redirected to the specified URL. You can choose to link to an attachment page, media file, custom URL, or none.
• Size. This determines the size of the image that you add to your site’s front-end. By default, you have four different sizes to choose from – thumbnail, medium, large, and full size.

Step 5: Insert the Image

Now that your image is all set to go, all that’s left to do is insert it into the post. To do this, click the blue Insert into post button at the bottom-right corner of the Media Library’s interface.

The image should be added to your post’s text editor where you positioned the cursor. It should look something like this:

Method 2: From a URL

Alternatively, if there’s an image published on another website that you’d like to insert into your own post or page then you can use the Insert from URL option instead. Here’s how:

From the Media Library’s interface, navigate to the Insert from URL option.

Next, paste the image’s URL in the text box. Once you do that, a preview of the image will appear below the text box along with options to enter a caption and alt text and configure its alignment and link to settings.

Once you’re done configuring the image’s settings, hit the Insert into post button to insert it into your post.

Conclusion

With images, you get more with less. Not only do they draw in your readers’ attention but they’re also great for the technical aspects of website growth such as its search engine optimization. We showed you how to add images to your WordPress site’s posts and pages keeping search engine optimization in mind. Hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take things further yourself.

Do you have any questions about how to add images in WordPress? Let us know by commenting below!