In How To Articles

Last updated on August 1st, 2022

How to hide the Featured Image in a WordPress post

A featured image, also called the post thumbnail in WordPress, appears alongside or on top of the post. It is the primary image for a blog post and represents the post’s mood.

Featured images are a great way of engaging viewers and increasing website traffic as they help break the monotony of the text and make the content visually appealing. Search engines and social media platforms also display search results and news feeds.

Generally, all WordPress themes support a featured image for posts. But Featured images are also used with pages and custom post types.

This article will discuss some easy ways to hide the featured image for all posts and for a single post. We have focused on the following methods:

  1. Using the current theme’s options
  2. Using a WordPress Plugin
  3. Using custom CSS code

Of these methods, the first two might require a bit of trial-and-error since not all WordPress themes may support the option to hide the post image. It is also possible that the plugins we suggest may not be compatible with your website’s theme. The third method would require additional CSS coding, but it always works! The following sections will discuss each of these methods in greater detail.

Using WordPress theme options

In this method, we will use the current WordPress theme’s in-built options to hide the thumbnail for a specific WordPress post. We have used the Neve theme and the Classic Editor. You can use any WordPress editor like the Block Editor or another page builder. Depending on your choice, the location of the theme options on the post editor screen might change slightly.

From the WordPress dashboard, go to Posts and click ‘All Posts’. Next, find the post whose thumbnail you want to hide, and click ‘Edit Post’.

In the post edit screen, navigate to the Post Settings in the right sidebar. In the ‘Components’ section of the post settings, we can choose to disable the featured image.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

Generally, premium WordPress themes like Mai Lifestyle Pro have this feature built-in. To check whether your theme supports this feature, follow the above-mentioned steps and open up an existing post. Scroll down to the post settings to locate the option.

The Neve theme also allows disabling the featured image for all posts. The following steps will walk you through this:

1. From the WordPress dashboard, click ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Customize’.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

2. Then click on Layout and select Single Post. Scroll down to the Elements Order section of the Customizer.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post
How to hide featured image in WordPress post

3. In the Elements Order section, click on the ‘eye’ icon next to the thumbnail. The Thumbnail tab will become greyed out and move to the bottom. It will disable the featured image for all posts. Click the Publish button on the upper right corner to allow the changes to take effect.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post
How to hide featured image in WordPress post

If the theme settings don’t support this method, we suggest you try the other two ways.

Using a WordPress Plugin

If your theme doesn’t allow you to hide a post thumbnail using built-in functions, you can use a plugin to achieve the same result. Plugins ease the process of adding functionality to the website. The WordPress repository, also called the Plugin Directory, provides a vast collection of plugins. Before installing a plugin, do read its reviews.

It is important to remember that plugins are powerful tools and can break your website if they run into a conflict with the theme or existing plugin code. It is always a good idea to experiment with plugins in a staging environment before installing them on the live WordPress site.

The two most popular plugins that might serve our purpose are:

a) Hide Featured Image

b) Conditionally Display Featured Images

a) Hide Featured Image Plugin

Before you consider using it, please note that this plugin has not been updated for a long time. Even though we tried using it with WordPress 5.9.3, we would not recommend it out of security concerns. Its compatibility with the latest WordPress version is also a little questionable. That said, the Hide Featured Image plugin is pretty straightforward and can be used to hide featured images on specific pages as well. It is also compatible with custom post types.

Once you install and activate the plugin, open up an existing post and navigate to the right sidebar. The Hide Featured Image meta box will show up in the post editor as shown. Select ‘No’ in the options box and Update the post to hide the feature image.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

b) Conditionally Display Featured Images

The following steps will help you install the plugin and give you the option to hide the thumbnail on individual posts:

1. Install and Activate the Conditionally Display Featured Images plugin from the WordPress repository. Once activated, the plugin works out of the box.

2. Open an existing post in the editor and navigate to the Featured Image section on the right sidebar. A checkbox will be displayed below the featured image. To hide the post thumbnail, check the box next to “display featured image in post lists only, hide on singular views”.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

3. Update your post, and the thumbnail should disappear when you view the post you just edited.

If this doesn’t work, it is likely that the plugin isn’t compatible with your theme. You might have to resort to the alternative method of using custom code. You can also try out a different plugin like the Quick Featured Images before completely giving up on this method. It allows you to set, replace and delete featured images in bulk. Remember to use it on the staging site first.

Using custom CSS code

This is the most fool-proof method of hiding a post image. The most challenging bit in this method is figuring out the CSS class for the image we want to hide. In this section, we will discuss how to hide the featured image for a specific post as well as for all posts using a custom code.

We have used the Twenty Twenty-One theme and the Classic Editor for this section.

Hiding the Featured image for a single post

The following steps will help us find the CSS classes we need. We will then gather this helpful information to write the necessary code to hide the thumbnail for singular posts:

1. We first need to open up an existing post in the editor and click on the Preview button in the Publish section. This may vary slightly based on the WordPress editor you use. Clicking on the Preview button will open up the post preview in a new tab in your browser.

2. In the preview, right-click on the thumbnail and click on “Inspect Element”. This will open up the Developer tools from which we can find the CSS class for our post thumbnail.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

3. In the Developer Tools, a section of code will be highlighted. This will likely be the HTML code for the image enclosed in the <img /> tag. Look for the container of this image. In our case, it is the <figure> tag.

Depending on how the theme has been written, the container tag can vary and could be a <div>. Once you have found the container, note down its CSS class. For us, it is “post-thumbnail”.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

4. Now that we have the featured image class, we need to find the CSS class specific to the post on which we want to hide the featured image. To do this, we need to look closely into the Developer tools once again. Scroll up to the body tag.

You will notice a CSS class that contains the post ID. Take a note of this class by first double clicking on the class names and then copying the class name containing the post ID. For us, it is “postid-1”.

Bear in mind that it might take a little more effort on your part if you’re using a different theme.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

5. Next, we will combine the two classes to write our CSS code:

.postid-1 .post-thumbnail {
display: none;
}

6. Now add this code to your website’s stylesheet and save changes. If you have a caching plugin, clear the cache and the changes should be through. An alternative way is to add this code through the Additional CSS option in the theme, but we recommend you use the stylesheet. You can add the code through Additional CSS as follows:

a) From the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance and click Customise.

b) Next, click on Additional CSS and paste your code.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

c) Click the Publish button at the top to finalise the changes. Clear cache and your thumbnail should be hidden.

How to hide featured image in WordPress post

Hiding Featured images for all posts

Similarly, we can also hide the post thumbnail for all posts. We need the CSS class for the featured picture container to do this. If you look closely into the developer tools once again, you might find a CSS class in the <body> tag that would be common for all posts.

To see this, we recommend you preview a couple of posts and go through the developer tools on those as well. For us, this common class was “single-post”. So, our custom code now becomes:

.single-post .post-thumbnail {
display:none;
}

Add this code to your stylesheet as we discussed earlier, and that should hide the thumbnail from all the posts.

Which method to use?

We discussed three different ways to hide featured images in WordPress. We would strongly recommend the third Custom CSS route to hide the thumbnail. However, as we saw throughout the post, every theme is different and has different options. Moreover, your familiarity and comfort with WordPress will also play a significant role.

I hope this article helped you find the best way out and contributed to your WordPress journey.