Engaging your audience is an ever more challenging prospect for most sites, as competition for their attention grows fiercer every day. When you Add an Author’s Photo in WordPress it gives the Author more credibility.
One way to strengthen the connection between your site and its readership is to give a face to the authors of your posts and articles.
For a long time, WordPress has been integrated with Gravatar, and most WordPress themes allow you to add that avatar at the side of each post. However, photos are a far more personal touch, and offer something different for your audience.
Because this is an easy and effective thing to do, this is a short guide to get photos integrated into your site and adding that touch of personalization that an author photo brings.
Working with Gravatar
If you have not used gravatar before, then you will need to sign up with them to get your photo ready for use. Once through the sign-up process, go back to the gravatar site and log in to your new account.
Here you can see the option to upload the image you wish to use, just follow the instructions and it will take just a few seconds.
If you operate a site that uses multiple authors, each person will have to open an account and upload the image they wish to use.
Having an image next to each author makes your whole site seem more personal and can bring benefits across your site over time, so is well worth the small amount of time it takes to do this.
Working in WordPress
With all the images needed uploaded to Gravatar, it’s time to set things up back in WordPress. How you approach this differs depending on the kind of site you operate.
If the site has just a single author, then you just need a little bit of HTML code, for multiple authors, the best route is a plugin.
We will first look at the single author solution by you getting to Add an Author’s Photo in WordPress.
If you just want to add a photo for a single author, begin by logging into the site’s WordPress administration area. You can then follow the menu, first go to the Appearance menu, then select Editor and from the files shown, select the one named single.php.
From here, you need to pick where you want the image to appear in the file, and at that location paste in the following code:
