How to Resize Images in the WordPress RSS Feed for Email Use

by | Jun 9, 2020 | How-To | 0 comments

Are you looking to send out automatically send new blog posts to your newsletter subscribers? Chances are you’ll want the images to scale properly. In this guide, you will learn how to resize images in the WordPress RSS feed for email purposes.

The Problem

Some email providers scale images to fit the width of the email automatically. This means, no matter what the size of the image is in the RSS feed, the image will properly resize to fit the width of the email. However, there are some email providers that don’t have this feature.

Send Images to RSS

Recently I was setting up a Mad Mimi account for a client of another online marketer. I noticed as I sent out test emails that none of the images would resize to fit the width of the email. Naturally, I turned to the WordPress plugin directory. I decided to try the plugin, Send Images to RSS. It worked great for the client’s purposes. I’m going to walk through how I setup the Send Images to RSS to fit their needs.

Image showing Send Images to RSS on the Add Plugins screen.

Resizing Images in the WordPress RSS Feed for Email Use

The next step to resize images in your RSS feed is to configure the Send Images to RSS plugin. The plugin can be configured by navigating to the settings tab on the sidebar, and click the Send Images to RSS button.

Settings dropdown displaying how to navigate to the Send Images to RSS settings.

From there, the settings page for the plugin will appear. I made a few changes. The first step I did was change the Featured Image Size to mailchimp ( 560×1120 ). This size worked alright for me, but feel free to change it to what you prefer. This is the size the featured image will be in the RSS feed. It’s important to note however, the featured image may appear squished vertically.

In the case of the client I worked with, I made a direct code tweak to Send Images to RSS to fix that. I’m going to look at submitting a pull request to fix that (bug?). I also marked the checkbox, Add the featured image to the beginning of the full post (uses General Image Settings). This puts the featured image above body text for posts in the RSS feed. These are the only two changes I made in the plugin settings. You can see the complete settings page for my configuration below:

My configuration of the Send Images to RSS plugin.

Final Thoughts

Now that images are scaled in the WordPress RSS feed for email. The scaling of images from blog posts in your email newsletter should now at least be improved.

Before using Send Images to RSS, all of the images in the feed are full size. That’s no good for emails. By using this plugin, I was able to scale the images down to a much more reasonable size. It’s a huge win. My only concern with Send Images to RSS is that it hasn’t been updated in 9 months. However, I don’t think it’s a type of plugin that needs to be updated very often. I’m hoping it will continue to be maintained.

Hopefully this guide helped you solve the problem of scaling images in the WordPress RSS feed for email purposes. If you’re stuck, we offer WordPress consulting and we would be happy to help you out, just contact us.