How to Hide Featured Image in WordPress (4 Easy Methods)

Whether you want to achieve a more minimalistic look on your site or just remove photos from certain areas of your site, learn how to hide a featured image in wordpress is a useful skill to have in your toolbox.

This gives you the most flexibility in deciding which featured images to hide and which to show. 🥷

How to hide featured image in WordPress

The problem is that WordPress automatically enables featured images, so you’re often stuck in an all-or-nothing situation where you can’t just hide a featured image in a post while leaving the rest.

🍀 Fortunately, we have several methods to hide a featured image in WordPress and they are achieved through:

1. Uploading featured images for certain posts just doesn’t
2. Hide displayed images using your theme’s settings (if available)
3. Hide shown images with code
4. Conditional hiding of featured images using a plugin

Read on to learn more about them.

Method 1: Just don’t upload a featured image in a specific post

This one is easy.

One way to “hide” featured images—either in the blog listing or in individual posts—is by not uploading featured images in the first place.

You can also delete featured images if you previously uploaded them.

👉 As an example, we left the following Featured Image empty section within a post.

You can do this by either not uploading an image at all or by clicking Remove featured image Button for a post with an uploaded.

After saving or updating the post, no featured image will appear on the individual post.

This post is also missing a featured image to blog Page (where all posts are listed), while other posts with featured images continue to show them.

However, on some themes, the blog listing page can look a bit strange if you don’t upload a featured image, so it’s important to test how it looks on your theme.

Method 2: Use your theme’s settings to hide featured images (if available)

Selected images appear in two places:

• Posts/Pages: somewhere (usually at the top of every single post you make), assuming you have selected images uploaded
• The blog page: the list of posts you have published on your site

So maybe you want to hide them in both places or just one of them.

Regardless, it’s a good idea to double-check your theme settings before messing with more complicated stuff like coding, as many themes already have options to hide featured images in WordPress.

👉 For example, the Neve theme gives you the option to hide the featured image on the entire site or only on specific posts. You can also choose between hiding featured images on the blog listing page, the individual post page, or both.

Let’s go through the different options…

Hide displayed images from blog listing pages

Once Neve is installed, go to Appearance > Customize in WordPress, then click Layout > Blog/Archive.

Find the post Office contents command section, and then click Eye icon where it says thumbnail.

This causes the display of the “thumbnail‘, which is another word for featured image when referring to the images on yours to blog Side.

With this, every single post with a post image hides the photo on the to blog Side. This is the to blog The page consists only of post titles, descriptions, and any metadata you included.

Hide displayed images from all single post pages

The Neve theme also offers the option to hide all featured images in the actual posts.

Using the method in this section will hide the featured image for each individual post. However, in the next section, you will learn how to easily hide the featured image for individual posts.

First navigate to Appearance > Customize in WordPress, then click Layout > Single Post.

if you have one normal Header layout, scroll down for order of elements section of customizer.

Unmark Eye icon next to that thumbnail Element.

That hides the “thumbnail” (another name for a featured image) from the post’s view.

If you use one cover Header layout, the process is slightly different.

Scroll down layout section of customizer to find a setting Hide featured image. Flip this switch and press the Publish Button.

When the setting is enabled, you will see the featured image will be hidden in the post.

Not only that, every single post on your entire site also hides its associated images.

💡 But remember that hiding the featured image for posts in the theme settings will still leave them visible on the to blog Side. So it’s a wonderful option if you want less clutter in the posts but still like thumbnail features on the images to blog Side.

Of course, you can also remove the thumbnails as discussed earlier.

Hide displayed images for individual blog posts

Finally, Neve (and many other popular themes) also gives you options to hide the featured image on a single post’s page, while keeping them enabled by default.

To access this setting, open the editor of the post where you want to hide the featured image. Then click the Never icon in the top right corner to open the New options. You can then disable the featured image in elements Section.

Method 3: Hide trending images with code

Hiding featured images with CSS code is the most technical method, but it gives you the ability to target the specific posts where you want to hide the featured image.

However, you may need to know some basic CSS skills to customize these snippets to fit your theme.

To hide the featured image for a specific post using CSS, go to Appearance > Customizethen navigate to Additionally CSS.

Paste this bit of code into the Additional CSS Area:

.post-123 .wp-post-image {
display: none;
}

click Publish.

Then just replace those 123 with the ID number associated with the desired location.

Find this number by opening the post editor. There you can search in the browser for the URL of the WordPress editor, which is followed by a number post=.

After getting the code and correct post number, into the Additionally CSS Be sure to click the box Publish Button. WordPress will then hide the featured image for this post and no others.

💡 Remember that the to blog Page on your site using this method will still display the thumbnails of the featured images.

Additionally, you should be able to visit other posts besides the one you hid the featured image in to see their featured images.

Method 4: Use a plugin that conditionally hides selected images

As a final measure, you might consider conditionally hiding or showing selected images with a plugin.

In layman’s terms, this is a fancy way of saying that you can hide a selected image on certain pages, and it’s all handled by a plugin.

To do this, use the plugin called “Conditional display of featured images on individual posts and pages”.

Install and activate the plugin, then go to posts at WordPress. Select a post for which you want to hide the featured image.

Under the post Office tab (on the right) find the highlighted picture Section.

If the plugin is now installed, you will see an option to “Only show the displayed image in post lists, hide it in single views.”

Check this box to enable the feature.

Be sure to click To update or Publish Button to make the changes live.

You will find that the plugin still leaves thumbnail features in yours to blog page list.

However, the true purpose of the plugin is to hide the featured image on just a post or page without forcing you to delete the image.

And for that it works perfectly.

ℹ️ Note: Some themes adopt featured image functionality with “cover” images, so this plugin may not work if you have covers enabled. For example, in the Neve theme, the plugin will only work properly if you have that normal Header layout set but it doesn’t do anything with that cover header layout.

summary

If you’re overwhelmed with creating featured images for every post 😟, we also have a post that shows you how to easily create featured images with Canva ⬅️.