How to Add Featured Image to RSS Feed in WordPress

By Default WordPress only includes the excerpt in the RSS feed. Many a times one might need to add the Featured Image to WordPress RSS feed.

There are two ways to go about it

1) Customizing and Editing the theme functions.php file

2) Use a Plugin.

In this post I will focus on the second point and will share a plugin which will allow you add the featured image to the feed without any coding.

The Plugin is aptly named Featured Images for RSS Feed and can be downloaded for free from the wordpress plugin repository.

The plugin is developed and maintained by Rob Marlbrough (Twitter Profile).

At the time of writing this post,  the plugin has over 16,000 downloads and sixteen 5 star ratings.  A quick look at the support section shows that the plugin is actively supported and the author is very helpful.

How to Use the Plugin

Using the plugin is very straight forward.  Just download and activate the plugin and it will get to work.  By default the plugin will insert the thumbnail into to the RSS feed.

Configuration

Plugin allows a user to configure:

1. Featured Image size (thumbnail , Medium Large etc) and

2. Image alignment (Image on Top-Right, Image on Top-left) etc.

Refer to the following screenshot

View the Result

Now it time to see the plugin in action.

1. First install Rss Subscription Extension for Google Chrome. This extension will allow you to view your feed as HTML.
2. Now open your feed page and you will see the images included in the feed.  Generally the feed page url is http://yourwebsite.com/feed.

Here is a Before and After Screenshot for comparison.

What if the Image is Not visible?

The most probable cause is that you have a cache plugin installed. Purge the cache and try again. Also remember to clear the browser cache.

Conclusion

All in all is an neat little plugin which lets you beautify the RSS feed in 2 minutes :-). Highly recommended