Photos, like video, attract the attention of your web visitors and they draw them in to engage with your website. Posting engaging photos on your church website is a best practice and it seems simple enough, right? While WordPress does make it considerably easy to upload photos, there are some special tips you should implement when it comes to editing your photos properly for optimal appearance on your website.
Here’s a quick guide to the basics of photo editing with WordPress.
One key thing to watch out for when uploading photos to WordPress is size. An image that is too big or too small won’t look right on your website. For best results, you can crop images down to the correct size.
Uploading Your Image
The first step is to upload your image to your WordPress media library. You can do this by clicking on the ‘Media’ button on the left menu of your WordPress dashboard. Then click ‘Add New’.
From there, you can upload an image from your computer.
Your new photo will be added to your media library. Now you can crop and resize it! If you click the image, you can pull up the attachment details. This will include things like the name of the file, the dimensions (in pixels), and the file’s storage size. You can also add a caption, description and alt text in certain fields on this page.
Click on the ‘Edit Image’ button below the photo. This will open the WordPress image editor.
Cropping and Resizing an Image
Now you can crop or scale your image. Cropping involves cutting parts of an image out and scaling (or resizing) is the practice of making the image smaller by adjusting the pixels instead of cutting anything out.
You can crop your image in WordPress by clicking on the crop button on the far left above the image. Select your desired section and click the crop button again. Then click ‘Save’. Congratulations! Your image has been cropped!
Some images are too big to fit comfortably on your website’s blog or homepage. This requires resizing/scaling. To scale an image, set your desired dimension in either the ‘height’ or ‘width’ box and click ‘Scale’. WordPress will automatically scale the image so the height and width are correctly aligned.
We recommend scaling image to the dimensions of 1080×720 for optimal appearance on social media. Sometimes this requires cropping a portion of an image after scaling.
Basic image editing with WordPress is pretty simple as you can see. With these tools, you can publish engaging photos on your church website within a matter of minutes!
