One of the simplest way you can decrease the bounce rate of your blog is by helping your readers to take an action after reading the post. Thumbnails tend to be a huge part of most WordPress themes these days. Even very simple themes make use of them in different places. And so given the importance of thumbnails, we thought we would go over 15 amazing free WordPress post thumbnail widget plugins that might help you get even more out of this powerful and attention-grabbing feature.
You can show them with or without thumbnails, and can also pick the related posts option from different design options. If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader. Maybe you’re interested to take a look at the following articles: Premium 4 Column Themes for WordPress, Free WordPress Plugins for Financial Blogs, Fresh Free WordPress Themes for 2015 and Free Lightroom Presets for Designers.
1. Category Posts Sidebar Widget
This plugin provides site admin to use this widget on sidebars. The widget has options to set the parameters for multiple categories selection, number of posts, comments count, sorting, widget class, title class, show date and featured image thumbnails.
2. Gabfire Media Module
Gabfire Media Module extends the functionality of WordPress Featured Image to support Videos and Default Post Images. Videos and pictures don’t have to be difficult. Gabfire themes include a media module that makes embedding media simple. You may want to use this option function just to get featured post thumbnails.
3. 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. Add an instance of the “Feature a Page Widget” to the sidebar of your choosing. Select the Page, choose a layout, and give the widget a title if you want.
4. 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.
5. WP Fake Image Replacer
With WP Fake Image Replacer you don’t need to upload pictures. Just use the_post_thumbnail() function wherever you want and the plugin auto generate a fake image holder. Just change the thumbnail size whenever you want and the plugin generates automatically a new fake image.
6. 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.
7. External URL To Post Thumbnail
This plugin allow you to extract image from external url and save into your own wordpress media library and set the featured image of post. This also save you steps to download the image to local computer and upload again to your own wordpress.
8. SB RSS Feed Plus
Add post thumbnail to each post’s excerpt and full text (if enabled in WordPress configuration). Image will be added just before text of each post in RSS feed. Post thumbnail is also added as media:content and enclosure tag to RSS feed.
9. 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.
10. 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 this plugin attempts to give the users an interface to manually fix those thumbnail and random images.
11. 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 code.
12. Instant Featured Image
This plugin solves this problem by adding a new button alongside the “Insert into post” button in the media manager modal. When clicked, this button will insert your selected media and then, if you have selected an image, set that image as the post’s featured image.
13. WordPress Auto Featured Image
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. Please note this application will trigger and set thumbnail when a new post is being published or modified and missing thumbnail.
14. 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.
15. Post Thumbnail Extras
Provides a shortcode for embedding post-thumbnails. Authors can quickly change pictures in posts without wading through HTML. This can be awesome in several ways: if your post-thumbnails change the width or height due to a theme change.
