In this article, we will show you how to require featured images for posts in WordPress. If the featured image is not found, then the publish functionality will return an error asking the author to add the featured image.

Why Require Featured Images for Posts?

WordPress makes it extremely easy to add featured images also known as post thumbnails. This is why most WordPress themes comes with built-in support for these additional image sizes. A lot of these layouts do not look good if the post thumbnail is missing.

The problem comes when you accidentally forget to add a featured image and publish the post. This gets worst if you have a multi-author team, and you don’t have a good editorial workflow.

To ensure that the featured image is always there, you have two options. First, you can set a default fallback featured image and that will sort of fix the issue because it will display a default image if no thumbnail was found.

Now while this fixes the layout issue, it is not always best case scenario. Alternatively, you can require featured images for all posts before they can be published.

Requiring Featured Images in WordPress

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Require Featured Image plugin. This plugin works out of the box, so there are no settings for you to configure. Simply go to Posts » Add New, and you will see a red notification informing you that this post can not be published without a featured image. You will also notice that the Publish button is disabled.

Now go ahead and upload a featured image to the post. As soon as you do that, the notice will disappear and the Publish button is enabled again.

This is a very simple and clever solution to get the job done.

You can also add a pre-publish blog post checklist to your WordPress site that will allow authors to check the items before publishing a post.

We hope this answers how to require featured images for posts in WordPress.