How to Create a WordPress Featured Gallery to Highlight Content

Last updated on Jan 22, 2024 by Southie Williamson Reader Disclosure

Want to display featured products, blog posts, projects and more on your website? Having an image gallery with featured content is a great way to direct your visitors to your very best content and offerings. In this article, we’ll share how to create a WordPress featured gallery.

By default, WordPress doesn’t offer the option to display a featured content gallery. However, you can use an image gallery plugin to easily display featured content from your posts, pages, products, and more.

Ready to learn how?

How to Display Featured Content in WordPress

1. Install Envira Gallery

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Envira Gallery plugin.

Envira Gallery is the best premium WordPress gallery plugin, allowing you to create beautiful image and video displays. A drag-and-drop builder and multiple layouts including including slideshow, fullscreen, masonry, lightbox display, and more make creating a stunning gallery effortless.

Envira Gallery’s Featured Content Addon makes it easy to display featured images, products, blog posts, and more anywhere on your website.

Check out more of our most popular features:

• Filterable galleries and albums using tags.
• Albums to organize and manage galleries.
• Built-in image compression.
• eCommerce integration to display and sell photos.
• Dynamic galleries to display content from other sources like blog posts, testimonials, Instagram posts, and more.
• Social sharing buttons on images, galleries, and albums.
• And lots more…

The first step is to head to the Envira pricing page and grab the license level that works for you. You’ll need the Plus plan or higher to add galleries based on your WordPress blog posts, pages, testimonials, and other custom post types.

After that, you’ll need to download the plugin’s ZIP file and install / activate it on your site. (You can learn how to install a plugin on WordPress here.)

Once activated, head to Envira Gallery » Settings and paste your license key (found in your Envira account area or your purchase confirmation email). Press Verify Key when you’re done.

2. Activate the Featured Content Addon

Next, we need to install and activate the addon that will allow you to add featured images and content to your gallery.

Go to Envira Gallery » Addons and find the Featured Content Addon. Press Install.

After it finishes installing, press the button that will now say Activate.

You’re ready to create a gallery with featured images in WordPress!

3. Add a Featured Content Gallery

Navigate to Envira Gallery » Add New to create a new image gallery in WordPress.

Go ahead and add a title for your image gallery, and hit the Publish button.

Your image gallery is ready. Now you can add featured content to it!

Click the tab in the upload box that says Galleries from Other Sources and select the Featured Content option.

Now, if you scroll down a little, you’ll see new settings in the Gallery tab.

Remember, you can use Envira Gallery to show featured posts for a variety of content on your site. Of course it works great for displaying featured blog posts, but you can also use it for things like reviews if you use a testimonial plugin, property listings if you use a real estate plugin, and lots more.

4. Customize Your WordPress Featured Gallery

In the Gallery Settings panel, the Gallery tab will allow you to choose your post type, taxonomies (tags and categories), specific posts to include or exclude, and more.

You can also sort your featured content posts (by date, ascending or descending orders, post status, author, etc.), edit the number of featured posts to display, set the gallery image / title to link to the post, and adjust caption content.

Pro Tip: By default, Envira Gallery will use each post’s featured image as the thumbnail image. If your images are not showing up, check your posts and add featured images if needed. Or, you can set a fallback image on this settings page for posts that don’t have a featured image.

You can use the other tabs in the settings panel to customize layout, image size, lightbox display, mobile settings, and more. For example, use the Configuration tab to choose your gallery layout (masonry, grid, carousel image slider, blogroll, etc.). Check out our guide on How to Create an Image Gallery with Thumbnails in WordPress to learn more about editing your basic gallery settings.

Once you’re satisfied with your gallery settings, click the Update button.

5. Insert Your Featured Content Gallery in WordPress

Now it’s time to add your featured gallery to a post, page, or widget area.

There are a few ways to do this. You can use a shortcode to insert the gallery anywhere on your site, Envira’s native Gutenberg block to add it using the block editor, or the Envira widget to add it to a widget area like the sidebar. Let’s take a look at each way.

How to Add Your WordPress Featured Gallery with a Shortcode

In the right sidebar, under the update button, you’ll see a shortcode and some other information about your image gallery. You’ll need to copy the shortcode from here.

Now, go to the existing post or page where you want to add your featured content image gallery, or click Post / Page » Add New to create one.

Simply paste the shortcode into the classic visual editor or into a shortcode block if you’re using the block editor.

You can click Preview Changes to see how your WordPress featured gallery looks before making it live. If you’re happy with it, hit the Publish button.

How to Add Your WordPress Featured Gallery with the Block Editor

To add your featured content gallery to WordPress using Envira’s native block, head to any post or page and click + to insert a new block wherever you would like it.

Search for and select the Envira Gallery block.

After selecting the block, use the dropdown menu to select your featured content gallery from the list.

Make sure to press Publish or Update to save it!

How to Add a WordPress Featured Gallery Widget

Since available widgets are determined by your WordPress theme, your widget-ready areas may vary, but common ones include the sidebar or footer.

To add your gallery to a widget area, go to Appearance » Widgets. Click the expand the widget area where you’d like to insert your featured content gallery. For example, we’re adding ours to the Main Sidebar.

Click the + sign in the top left to add a new block. Now, scroll down to Widgets category and drag Envira Gallery to place it in the widget area.

After dragging it over, you can add a display title, select your gallery from the dropdown list, and specify how many images to show in the widget.

When you’re done, click Update.

That’s it! You can now go to your site and see how the featured content image gallery appears on your website. For example, we added featured blog posts to our sidebar area.

Congrats, you learned how to add a WordPress featured gallery to your website! Now you can highlight important content easily.

If you enjoyed learning how to create a WordPress featured gallery, be sure to check out our guide on How to Import Instagram Photos in WordPress Image Galleries.

Not using Envira Gallery? Get started today!

Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and X (Twitter) for the best photography tips, resources, and WordPress tutorials.