How to Add Images to Your Website in WordPress: A Word on Slow Page Load Time

You’ve just finished building your new WordPress website, and now it’s time to add some life to the content. Maybe you’re trying to grow your YouTube viewership by adding more entertaining content to your channel. Or maybe you’re just looking to showcase your new photography work. Adding images to your site is a great way to accomplish this, and along with the right plugins and a few tricks, you can have images on your site almost instantly.

Let’s take a look at how to add images to your WordPress website.

The Basics

To add an image to your site, you first need to find a place for it. You have two options here: either upload it directly to your site using an FTP client, or else link to an external site where it sits. Let’s take a look at each option in turn.

Uploading Images to Your Site

If you already have an image hosted somewhere else, you can simply link to it using an URL. But if you’d like to use a free image hosting service like Flickr, Google, or Pixabay to store your images, the best approach is to upload them to your site directly. This way, you can ensure that they’ll be safely stored on your site and will be available for download by anyone who comes across them. For this tutorial, we’ll use the free Google Image Hosting service.

To upload an image to your site using Google’s hosting service, you first need to visit their website and log in or register for free. Once you’re there, click on the New Images link in the top navigation bar. Then, click on the Upload Image button beneath it. Next, find the photo you’d like to upload in your computer’s file system and click on the Open button to reveal it. Finally, click on the Upload button to send it to Google.

From here, you can navigate to the preview of your image. Simply click on the Preview link to the right of it to view it larger. Once you’ve seen it in the larger size, click on the Download button to save it to your computer. Now, you can upload as many images as you’d like using the Google Image Uploader.

Adding External Links

If you’ve chosen to upload your images to your site, you can then connect them to external sites using the WordPress Attribution and Linked plugins. With these two plugins, you can do the following:

• Attribution: Allows you to credit the source of an image when someone clicks on it. When a user clicks on an image, they’ll see a popup window with the name of the website or blog that the image is from, as well as a link back to the source. (This is especially beneficial for images you’ve found on Pinterest or Instagram)
• Linked: When an image is linked to another site or page, the viewer can click on it and be taken to that content as well. (This is like a shortcut bar that appears when someone clicks on an image. If an image is not linked, their system will simply take them to your site when they click on it)

To use these plugins, you must first install them from the WordPress dashboard. Then, you’ll need to visit your WordPress dashboard and click on the Plugins tab. From here, you can activate the plugins and click on the Settings button to configure them. For the Attribution plugin, you can enter a site name in the Attribution URL field. This is the URL that will appear when someone clicks on an image and is taken to the website or blog that the image is from. For the Linked plugin, you can enter the URL to another site or page in the External Link field.

This completes our tour of how to add images to your site in WordPress. We’ve covered the basics of finding a place for your images, uploading them to your site, and connecting them to external sites. Now, let’s dive into some more advanced techniques for adding more life to your content.

Advanced Techniques

Once you’ve got your images uploaded to your site and linked to some external sites, it’s time to start making them more interesting. To do this, you can play with the styling options of your images using the WordPress Caption plugin. This allows you to add captions to your images, which will then appear below them (hence the name Caption). Let’s take a look at how this plugin can help make your content more interesting.

The best part of this plugin is that you can add as many captions as you’d like for each image. To do this, head to the WordPress dashboard and click on the Plugins tab. From here, click on the Caption plugin shown underneath. Once activated, you can then click on the Settings button to configure the plugin. Here, you can enter your captions in the Caption field. Once you’ve entered your captions, click on the Save Settings button to save your changes and return to the dashboard.

From here, you can click on the Preview button to the right of any of the images to see it in a small popup window with the text you’ve entered in the Caption field. You can also click on the Save button to save the image with its current settings. Finally, you can click on the URL tab to the right of any of the images to see the link back to the site or page the image is attached to.

When an image has a caption, it can be clicked on and taken to the content or site it’s linked to. But for those who want to learn more about a certain topic or want to keep track of something they’ve seen on a blog or website, they can click on the image and be taken to a different site directly.

Still haven’t found the right image for your blog? Or perhaps you’ve already found one and just want to make it more prominent? Feel free to experiment with the plugins and CSS available to you, or use one of the many free image hosting services out there to get the job done. Whatever your needs, with WordPress, you can have images appearing on your site in no time at all.