Matt Mullenweg on giant header images
Can we all agree that giant per-post image headers look terrible on most blogs? It’s been a curse of default WP themes past few years, too. We need it to be easier to have posts without image headers and even without titles.
Matt Mullenweg, Twitter
Yes, we can all agree.
Many of the responses in that thread argue that posts need giant images for SEO. Possibly, but the theme could, like mine does, allow for featured images but doesn’t display them. That way the image is in the metadata for SEO, but doesn’t force me to scroll past 500KB of unnecessary, unrelated image data to read a 200-word post. Go Matt!
And building WordPress to be less dependent upon post titles would be a great thing. Let us reel in our social graphs if we want to. And just like with images, the theme could simply hide the image from the viewer, but include them in the OpenGraph data. Everyone wins!