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.