Cookely crops your Featured Image into several sizes depending on where it appears — homepage grids, archives, the Recipe Index, single posts. This covers what to upload, which size goes where, and how to keep your images fast.
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Switching to Cookely from another theme? Regenerate your thumbnails so every existing image is re-cropped at Cookely’s sizes. Do this after changing any option on this page too.
Upload Featured Images at least 2460px on the longest side.
That comes from the largest size Cookely generates — the retina portrait image for large single posts, at 1800×2460px. If your original is smaller, WordPress can’t produce that crop and falls back to a smaller file, which looks soft on retina screens.
A safe habit is to upload around 2500×2500px and let WordPress do the rest. You don’t need to crop to an exact shape: Cookely crops square, portrait and landscape versions from the same file, so give it room in both dimensions.
Homepage, archives and the Recipe Index
| Size | Dimensions | Retina |
|---|---|---|
| Square | 380×380px | 760×760px |
| Portrait | 380×520px | 760×1040px |
| Landscape | 380×250px | 760×500px |
| No crop | 380px wide | 760px wide |
Featured image at the top of a post — Normal size
| Size | Dimensions | Retina |
|---|---|---|
| Normal (no crop) | 800px wide | — |
| Landscape | 800×530px | 1600×1060px |
| Portrait | 800×1100px | 1600×2200px |
Featured image at the top of a post — Large size
| Size | Dimensions | Retina |
|---|---|---|
| Landscape | 900×600px | 1800×1200px |
| Portrait | 900×1230px | 1800×2460px |
You choose Normal or Large per post in the Post Options box while editing.
Which of the square / portrait / landscape crops gets used is a setting, not a guess. Go to Appearance → Customize → Post Options and pick a Featured Image style separately for:
Changing it here changes which registered size the theme asks for — so regenerate thumbnails afterwards if existing images look wrong.
Every registered size means another file generated for each upload. If your site never uses portrait thumbnails or the Large single-post size, switch those off in WPZOOM → Theme Options → Optimization:
This won’t speed up your site — the sizes actually in use are still generated — but it makes uploads quicker and keeps your uploads folder much smaller.
Disabling a size only stops new files being made; it doesn’t delete files that already exist. And re-enable a size before switching an aspect ratio back on, or the theme will fall back to a larger image and scale it down.
Food photography is the heaviest thing on a recipe blog, so two things are worth doing:
Lazy loading — images below the fold load only as the reader scrolls. WordPress does this natively for most images; caching plugins such as WP Rocket extend it to background images and iframes.
Modern formats — WebP files are typically 25–35% smaller than an equivalent JPEG. WordPress accepts WebP uploads directly, so you can convert before uploading with a free tool like TinyPNG, or install Imagify to compress and convert automatically.
Compress originals before uploading where you can — every generated size is made from that file, so a bloated original multiplies across your whole library.
See also:
