Give Each Page Its Own Image in Menus and Previews
Any page on your actor website can now carry its own thumbnail. It shows up wherever that page is listed: card layouts on the home page, image menus on the designs that use them, and the internal previews in your admin.
What a thumbnail is doing
On a text-only menu, nothing. On the several designs that present your pages as a grid of cards, the thumbnail is the page. A visitor decides whether to click Photos or Video based on the picture attached to each, and if both are blank placeholders they are choosing between two gray rectangles.
This is a small thing that separates a site that looks maintained from one that looks like a default install, and the difference is visible in about half a second.
Choosing well
- Reel or Video: a still from the reel itself, ideally one with your face and some context. Not a black frame, which is what an automatic grab usually produces.
- Photos: your strongest headshot, or a contrasting one if the home page already uses your strongest.
- Resume: a production still rather than a photo of paper. Nobody clicks a picture of a document.
- About: a candid rather than a headshot. It signals a different kind of page.
- Contact: something neutral. A location shot works if you want to signal the market you are in.
Sizing is handled
Upload whatever you have. We resize and crop it to whatever the design requires, keeping the center of interest in frame, and we serve a modern format so the page stays light. There is more on that in automatic image resizing on upload and faster images on every site.
Not the same as the social card
A thumbnail appears on your own site. The image somebody sees when they paste your link into a message is a different setting, covered in controlling how your site looks when shared. They can be the same picture. They usually should not be, because a social card is wide and a thumbnail is often square.
A word on consistency
Six thumbnails shot by six photographers in six different styles look worse than six mediocre thumbnails that match. If your photos vary a lot in tone, consider running them all through the same treatment before uploading. A single consistent look beats six better images that disagree, and our brand identity guide covers why that matters more than any individual image does.
Where to start
Do your top three menu items and leave the rest. Those are the pages people click. If you have not built a site yet, create one free and add thumbnails as your photos come in.
