So what is the featured image in WordPress? and what does it do? Well it really depends on the theme that’s currently being used. We like to use featured images to represent posts/articles on the archive pages, so visiting a category or taxonomy will bring up a list of posts and display their featured images to make the page visually more appealing. Once on the single view of a post the featured image is sometimes automatically included at the top of the post, or perhaps as a background to the whole page. So a featured image can be thought of as a single image that represents a post, how and if it is used by WordPress is entirely down to the theme your website is using.