We’ve seen WordPress improve over the years. Unfortunately, not all these improvements help better our experience. Indeed, you cannot please everyone.

Take for example the Featured Images feature. A lot of themes display the Featured Image, should you have tagged one in your post, as is right before or after the post title. These are not magazine-style themes and the featured image is presented nowhere near special at all. Why didn’t they just remove it altogether?

Below is a screenshot of my blog post with a Featured Image using Colinear theme:

Screenshot of a post with a Featured Image

Screenshot of a post with a Featured Image

Obviously, the Featured Images feature simply duplicated the presentation of the photo.

WordPress should have a system option to disable the Featured Images altogether, or at least the theme should integrate that option. Currently, all you can do to get rid of these duplicated images is to remove the Featured Image tag from each and every post that has a Featured Image, or use CSS. The former is too taxing especially if you have tons of such post, the latter–you better be ready to shell out a ridiculous $30 per year for Custom CSS if you are hosted in WordPress.com

The Featured Images feature should have been renamed to Duplicated Images.