In WordPress featured images are used for representing contents like posts, pages, and other custom post types, etc. You can easily assign a featured image (also called post thumbnail) to posts and pages of your website, it is used by many themes and plugins for enhancing the presentation of your content.
For Example New default WordPress theme i.e. Twenty Fourteen gives a very good display of featured images both on single and multi-post pages. There are various widget plugins for displaying posts with featured images on your sidebar. Featured images are also used by various social media websites at the time of fetching link details.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to set a featured image on a post, page, or custom post type in WordPress.
Step-1
Open any old post for editing or simply visit Dashboard -> Posts -> Add New page. Scroll a little bit down and you will be seeing a ‘Featured Image‘ meta box with the link ‘Set Featured Image‘.
Step-2
Now you have to click that link ‘Set Featured Image’, this opens up same old WordPress ‘Add Media‘ thick box but this time with a button ‘Set Featured Image‘. Upload an image and click that ‘Set Featured Image‘ button. That’s it. You can also assign any old uploaded media library image as featured.
The featured image can be set anytime while uploading any image from your post edit screen. WordPress ‘Add Media’ thick box already provides you ‘Set Featured Image’ option on the left side navigation menu.
Also, read our tutorial on How To Display Featured Image Via URL In WordPress?