The Customizer is primarily used by classic themes to make changes to your site’s appearance. Many themes (but not all) include a “Featured Content” setting to highlight specific posts in a special way. This guide will explain how to set up the Featured Content area.
In this guide
The steps in this guide apply to classic themes. Sites using modern block themes have much more control over how content is displayed using the Site Editor. There are many ways to feature content, such as by adding a Post Carousel block, or configuring a Query Loop block or Blog Posts block to display posts in various configurations.
Video Transcript
Hi, and welcome to WordPress.com. This video will show you how to use tags to control featured content on your website or blog’s homepage.
Featured content can be displayed with large thumbnails or with a slider. If you’d like to know if your current theme offers featured content, launch the Customizer. If you see the option, then you’re all set.
To find out how your particular theme displays featured content, click on the theme name at the top of the showcase and read the theme documentation.
To get started, click on the Featured Content section in the Customizer. Here you’ll be able to set what tag you’ll use to label your featured content. Save your changes.
Next, go to the pages or posts you want to tag as featured.
Click Edit and add your newly selected tag in the tags section. You’ll also want to upload a featured image since most themes will display these as part of the featured content.
Press Update.
Return to your homepage to see how it looks.
For more information about customizing your site, visit the WordPress.com support site.
The first step to setting up Featured Content is to define a tag your theme will use to recognize the content you wish to feature.
To choose this tag:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Go to Appearance.
- Select Customize.
- Select “Featured Content“. If Featured Content does not appear, it means your theme does not support this option.
- Choose a word to use as your Featured Content tag, and add it in the text field.
- We suggest using an all-lowercase, single word for your tag.
- Do not add any punctuation, such as quotation marks.
- If you’re unsure what to put here, we recommend using
featuredas your tag.
- Click the “Save Changes” button.
Some themes may also include a checkbox that says “Also display tagged posts outside the Featured Content area.” Tick this box if you would like posts to appear both in the Featured Content area and the main blog feed.
Next, you can add the tag you defined in the previous step to your content.
Most commonly, themes will support posts for featured content. Some themes may also support pages or portfolio projects — refer to your theme’s Info page to learn more.
To add the tag:
- In your site’s dashboard, click on Posts (or Pages or other supported content.)
- Click on the post you want to tag.
- Open the post settings sidebar.
- Find the Tags section.
- Using your keyboard, type your tag followed by a comma or the Enter key.
- When finished, click Update or Publish to apply the changes to that post.
Visit our Organize Posts with Tags guide for more detailed steps to add a tag to your content.
Themes that support Featured Content will typically display an image with your post to make the content more visually appealing.
Be sure to add a featured image to your post or page that will be displayed in the Featured Content area.
