How to Regenerate Thumbnails in WordPress?

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Regenerating thumbnails in WordPress is an important task when it comes to managing and optimising your website’s images. This process ensures that your images are displayed correctly and in the appropriate sizes. 

While there are various plugins available to help with thumbnail regeneration, but if you are using the Nexter theme, you can accomplish this without relying on any additional 3rd party plugins.

Requirement  – This is a feature of Nexter Theme, make sure its installed & activated to enjoy all its powers.

Before we jump into the process, let’s understand why you need to Regenerate Thumbnails in WordPress

  • Sometimes, WordPress users may face an issue where their featured images appear cropped or out of proportion.
  • WordPress saves images in different sizes when they are uploaded, and these sizes can be overridden by the theme being used.
  • Regenerating thumbnails allows you to update all thumbnail sizes for one or more images that have been uploaded to your Media Library.
  • Regenerating thumbnails is useful when a new thumbnail size has been added and you want past uploads to have a thumbnail in that size.

When you’re using the Nexter theme, you don’t have to use any 3rd party plugin to regenerate thumbnails you get this feature with its free native Nexter Extension plugin.

To regenerate thumbnails in WordPress, follow the steps.

Go to Appearance > Nexter Settings > Extra Options.

Then click Settings on Regenerate Thumbnails.

regenerate thumbnails settings

Now you’ll see a popup where you’ll find different thumbnail size options, turn on the toggles for the sizes you want to generate thumbnails for.

Note: Ensure you have enabled the PHP Module Imagick to regenerate thumbnails.

Once done, click on the Regenerate button and the thumbnails will be generated.

regenerate thumbnails popup

How to Enable PHP Module Imagick in Your Server?

The PHP Module Imagick will be enabled by default with most good hosting providers. 

But if it is disabled for some reason, the best option would be to ask your hosting provider to enable it.

Alternatively, if you are using cPanel’s WebHost Manager (WHM) you can follow this guide to install and enable Imagick. 

For a standard cPanel, go to Software section > Select PHP Version.

cpanel php version

Image source Hostinger.

On the next page, click the Extensions tab, and find the imagick extension in the list and click the checkbox to enable it.

cpanel enable imagick

But if you want to enable PHP Module Imagick in your XAMPP localhost, you can follow this guide.