How to Add a Featured Image to WordPress Categories The Easy Way

Adding a featured image to WordPress categories is something a lot of site owners want, especially for blog archives, custom layouts, or category landing pages. But if you’ve Googled this before, you’ve probably seen lots of references to custom PHP scripts to make this happen.

But here’s the thing: if you already use Yoast SEO, you can do this without writing a line of code or installing yet another plugin.

Why Add a Featured Image to Categories?

Adding an image to your category pages is useful when:

• You’re building a custom blog archive or shop category layout
• You want rich previews when sharing category pages on social media
• You want a visual header for category landing pages in Divi, Elementor, or Gutenberg

The Easy Way: Use Yoast SEO

If you’re using Yoast SEO (which many WordPress users already are), here’s how to add a featured image to a category or taxonomy term:

• Go to Posts > Categories (or your custom taxonomy)
• Click Edit on the category you want to modify
• Scroll down to the Yoast SEO meta box
• Click the Social tab
• Upload a custom image
• Boom. That image is now:
  • Saved as metadata on the term
  • Usable in your theme or builder with a shortcode or dynamic content

Automatically included in the page’s OpenGraph tags for rich previews

That’s it! I hope you find this article helpful!