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Feeling annoyed?
I get it.
Some things in WordPress are easy, and other things seem like they should be easy.
Adding captions to Featured Image is one of those things.
Most themes won’t display captions you add to Featured Images leaving you no way to display them.
But don’t worry!
There’s a simple solution.
In this post, you’ll find the best way to display captions under your Featured Images. This will work for every post on your site and doesn’t require writing any code or technical skills.
Plus, it’s compatible with all of our themes 🙂
Add captions to your Featured Images
To add the captions, I recommend the free Featured Image Caption plugin.
As you can see from the screenshot, it hasn’t been updated in a while, but it continues to work perfectly well.
Once you install the plugin, you’ll find a new Featured Image Caption option added to the sidebar of the editor.
You can fill out the Caption text input to enter whatever caption you want. You can also add a source attribution link which is great if you need to credit a photographer or designer for the image.
Some themes might just output the text under the image, but our themes have special styling for the Featured Image Caption that looks like this:
That’s all there is to adding the captions!
But before you go, there’s one more option you want to consider.
Choose where to display the caption
The Featured Image Caption plugin also adds a new sub-menu under Settings.
Two of these options are technical and added for developers. The option you want to check out is the second one.
By default, Featured Image Caption will output the caption on the blog and archive pages in addition to the post page itself. You might not want the captions visible on your blog. If so, check the second box in the settings page. Once checked, the caption will only display on the post page.
Conclusion
Like most things in WordPress, the problem of displaying captions under your Featured Images is easily solved with a plugin.
If the plugin recommended here doesn’t work well for your site, check out the FSM Custom Featured Image Caption plugin as an alternative.
If you have any questions about this guide or adding captions to your Featured Images, leave a comment in the comments section below.
