FetchPriority Featured Image

FetchPriority Featured Image is a lightweight plugin that automatically adds the fetchpriority="high" attribute to featured images on your WordPress site. This helps browsers prioritize the loading of these important images, improving your site’s performance and Core Web Vitals scores.

Key Features

• Automatically adds fetchpriority="high" to the hero / featured image
• Optional fetchpriority="low" for below-fold images — paired complement that tells the browser to defer non-critical loads
• <link rel="preload" as="image"> for the hero featured image on singular pages — strongest LCP signal
• AVIF / WebP detection — when a sibling .avif / .webp file exists on disk, an extra <link rel="preload" type="image/avif|image/webp"> is emitted so the browser picks the supported modern format automatically (works with ShortPixel, Imagify, Optimole, and similar)
• Theme presets — auto-detects Astra, GeneratePress, Kadence, Divi, and Hello Elementor and excludes their site-logo / header-image classes so the priority budget is spent on the real hero
• Avatar / Gravatar exclusion — never tags images with class avatar / gravatar or hosted on gravatar.com
• Settings page (Settings → FetchPriority) for per-context toggles, first-N control, preload, and exclusions
• Admin-bar debug badge showing how many images were tagged on the current page (total + how many got high)
• Compatible with most WordPress themes including Divi, Elementor, Astra, GeneratePress, Kadence, and any theme using standard the_post_thumbnail() / wp_get_attachment_image()

Why Use FetchPriority?

The fetchpriority attribute is a modern web standard that tells browsers which images should be prioritized during page load. By marking featured images as high priority, you can improve:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores
• User experience with faster loading of important images
• Overall page performance

Developer-Friendly

The plugin uses WordPress’s native filters and doesn’t modify your database or image files.