Thumbnails play an important role in most WordPress themes these days. Even the very simple ones make use of them in different places. When we think of visitors landing on our blog, we usually think of them landing on our homepage. However, most people land via search engines, links from other blogs, twitter, Facebook, and are landing on individual posts.
We decided to share with our readers 13 awesome WordPress free post thumbnail widgets for your WordPress-powered website or blog so you can get even more out of this beautiful and powerful feature. You are most welcome to suggest any additions to this list. You can use the comments box below to make any suggestions. You might also want to take a look at our previous selections:
- Amazing Free WordPress Listing Themes
- Powerful Free WordPress Thumbnail Widgets
- Best Knowledge Base WordPress Premium Themes
- Great WordPress Tooltip Plugins for Free Download
1. Feature A Page Widget
Feature A Page Widget aims to provide a “just works” solution for showcasing a Page in any sidebar. It leverages Core WordPress features, a simple set of options with a thought-through UI including three widget layouts. This plugin creates multiple custom image sizes. If you use images that were uploaded to the media library before you installed this plugin.
2. Featured Image Widget
Use this plugin to display the featured image for any post or page in your sidebar. If a featured image has been set. If no featured image has been set, the plugin tries to use the image of the parent post/page. Otherwise, no widget is displayed.
3. Dynamic Featured Image
Dynamically adds multiple featured image or multiple post thumbnail functionality to your page, posts and custom post types. This plugin provides you an interface to add any number of featured image as you want without writing a single line of code. These featured images can then be collected by the various theme functions. Dynamic Featured Image enables the option to have MULTIPLE featured images within a post or page. This is especially helpful when you use other plugins, post thumbnails or sliders that use featured images.
4. Ultimate Sticky Posts Widget
This Widget works well to display sticky/posts or both, with a wide variety of options, and loads more to come. This widget was designed to be easy to use for both the average user and the developer type.
5. WP-Force Images Download
This is a simple plugin that allows you to force the download of images or pictures such as jpeg,png etc. This plugin is very useful to those who want to download post attachment or featured image. Just put the template tag in single.php and this plugin automatically generates the download link for every post.
6. Better Recent Posts Widget
If you’ve ever wanted to display recent posts, but go far beyond the Recent Posts widget that comes with WordPress, you’re in the right place. One of the very best ways to increase time-on-site (and therefore the engagement of your audience) is helping visitors discover new and wonderful pages and posts on your site. Better Recent Posts Widget can do that by displaying your beautiful featured images right in the widget.
7. Ultimate Posts Widget
The ultimate widget for displaying posts, custom post types or sticky posts with an array of options to customize the display. Designed for both the average user and developer, Ultimate Posts Widgets aims to provide flexibility and ease of use for displaying any kinds of posts within your widget areas. An array of widget options are available as well as hooks, filters and custom templates for more advanced customization.
8. Related Posts by Taxonomy
Quickly increase your readers’ engagement by adding related posts in the sidebar or after post content with a widget or shortcode. Posts with the most terms in common will display at the top. This plugin is capable of finding related posts in multiple taxonomies and post types. Include or exclude terms from the search for related posts. Change the look and feel by using your own templates in your (child) theme.
9. Extended Featured Widget
The Extended Featured Content Widget is a powerful, light weight wordpress widget. You can decide, whether or not the post thumbnail is displayed, whether the post title, post info, meta, content etc are above or beneath the thumbnail and a couple of more things. And of course, you can style the widget individually. You can filter the content by category, post tags, taxonomy.
10. Require Featured Image
Requires your various post types as specified in a simple options page to have a featured image set before they can be published. If a lack of featured images causes your layout to break, or just look less-than-optimal, this is the plugin for you. Rather than forcing you to manually enforce your editorial standards of including a featured image in every post, if your contributors fail to add a featured image to a post before publishing it they’ll simply find it impossible to publish.
11. Post Thumbnail Editor
To meet the needs of themes where the post-thumbnails have random and capricious sizes (which causes wordpress to crop images simply from the middle (either chopping off the top and bottom or chopping off the sides), this plugin attempts to give the users an interface to manually fix those thumbnail and random images.
12. Admin Featured Thumbnail
Admin Featured Thumbnail WordPress plugin can Add featured image thumbnail to WordPress admin columns. It will help you easy to know which post is attached the featured image. Add click the thumbnail will popup preview the full image.
13. WordPress Auto Featured Image
Choose an image from your library and set this for default featured image for page, post and custom post types. This plugin provides you an easy way to set a default thumbnail image for your posts, pages or custom post types. You can select an image from your local machine or media library.
