Are images appearing poor quality or blurry on your site? This guide covers some of the most common causes of blurry images on a WordPress website and how you can resolve them.
In this guide
An image will appear blurry if it’s too small for the space it’s displayed in. While there’s no single recommended image size, you can refer to our image optimization guide to learn how to ensure an image is large enough to display in good quality on your website without being too large that it slows down your site’s speed.
If your images appear blurry, start by uploading a high-quality, larger image file and check if it looks better.
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You can size down a high-quality image file, but you can’t size up a low-quality image file with good results.
If uploading a larger, clearer image still doesn’t improve the appearance of the images on the live site, it might be one of the other issues listed below.
If your internet connection is extremely slow, the images could be downloaded at a lower quality, causing them to appear blurry. Try loading your website with a different, faster connection to check if the images look better that way.
This section of the guide applies to sites with the WordPress.com Creator and Entrepreneur plans, and the legacy Pro plan. For sites on the free, Starter, and Explorer plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
All WordPress.com sites have access to Jetpack, which provides many security, growth, and performance features. Sites on plugin-enabled plans benefit from additional Jetpack features, including the Content Delivery Network (CDN) used to speed up your site’s loading time. A CDN is a popular recommendation for speeding up your website and improving your visitors’ user experience.
As part of the CDN, Jetpack automatically compresses images uploaded to the CDN to ensure they load quickly. In most cases, this is a good thing because images can usually be sized down considerably without any noticeable difference in quality. However, this can sometimes cause blurry or poor-quality images, often due to other plugins installed or a conflict with a third-party theme.
To test if the CDN is causing your site’s images to appear in low quality, you can temporarily disable the Jetpack CDN by taking the following steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- On the left side, navigate to Settings → Performance (or Jetpack → Settings → Performance if using WP-Admin).
- Scroll down to the section named “Performance & speed.”
- Toggle off the button that says “Speed up image load times“.
For advanced developer options for the CDN, refer to the guide on managing the Jetpack CDN feature using hooks.
We take measures to provide a seamless experience with your images when switching from one WordPress.com theme to another. However, some third-party themes don’t have similar measures, which can affect your images when you switch to or from these themes.
If you’ve recently switched your site’s theme and noticed that all images uploaded on the new theme look good, but the older ones uploaded on the previous theme appear blurry, you can re-upload the older images on the new theme to get them to display correctly.
If you’re working on a plugin-enabled site, you can regenerate the blurry thumbnails using an image regeneration plugin or, if you are a developer, using WP-CLI. With these methods, you don’t have to manually upload all your older images again.
Occasionally, installing a new plugin on your site might cause your images to appear blurry. Updating an existing plugin can also introduce conflicts that may affect your images.
Try deactivating the plugin to see if the image quality improves. You may also need to restore a backup from before you installed the plugin to return the images to their previous state.
For detailed instructions on troubleshooting plugin conflicts, refer to our guide on solving problems with plugins.
