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Troubleshooting Blurry and Distorted Images in GeneratePress

36 threads Sep 9, 2025 Theme → Generatepress

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Images not displaying correctly is a common frustration for website owners. Issues can range from blurry thumbnails and incorrect sizing to images that simply won't load. Based on community reports, many of these problems stem from a few key areas. This guide will walk you through the most common causes and their solutions.

Common Causes of Image Issues

Image display problems in WordPress, and specifically with the GeneratePress theme, often originate from one of these sources:

  • Lazy Loading Conflicts: Features designed to improve site speed can sometimes conflict with how images are cropped or displayed, often only showing a portion of the full image.
  • Caching: Aggressive caching by plugins, your browser, or a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can serve outdated or incorrectly sized images.
  • Image Srcset & Sizes: WordPress automatically generates multiple image sizes and uses the srcset attribute to serve the 'best' one. Testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights might report a different size than what your browser actually uses.
  • Plugin or Theme Conflicts: Another plugin, or sometimes an update to the theme itself, can change how images are handled on archive or category pages.
  • Browser-Specific Bugs: Occasionally, an issue may only appear in certain web browsers due to how they interpret CSS or load assets.

Step-by-Step Troubleshooting

Follow these steps to identify and resolve the problem.

1. Clear All Caches

This is always the first step. Cached files are the most frequent culprit behind images not updating or displaying incorrectly.

  • Clear your caching plugin's cache (e.g., LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket).
  • Clear your CDN's cache (e.g., Cloudflare).
  • Clear your browser cache. You can often do a 'hard refresh' by pressing Ctrl + F5 (Windows) or Cmd + Shift + R (Mac).

2. Perform a Conflict Check

This will determine if another plugin is causing the issue.

  1. Temporarily deactivate all plugins except GeneratePress (and GenerateBlocks if you use it).
  2. Check if the image issue is resolved.
  3. If it is, reactivate your plugins one by one, checking after each, to find the one causing the conflict.

3. Investigate Lazy Loading

If lazy loading is causing images to be cropped incorrectly, you can try to exclude specific elements. Many optimization plugins have settings to exclude images or containers from lazy loading. If the problem is isolated to a specific block, try adding an exclusion for it there.

4. Regenerate Image Sizes

If you've changed your image dimensions or are seeing blurry images after a layout change, your existing images may not have been resized correctly. Use a plugin like Regenerate Thumbnails to create new image sizes for your media library.

5. Check Your CSS Selectors

If you are using custom CSS to style images, ensure your selectors are specific enough. A broad selector like .single img:first-child will target the first image inside any container, including sidebars. A more specific selector, such as targeting a figure block within the main content area, is often needed for precision.

6. Address the srcset Attribute

If PageSpeed Insights reports a different image size than what loads in your browser, it's likely analyzing the srcset options. WordPress is probably still choosing the correct size for your layout. Disabling srcset with a filter is not recommended, as it harms performance. Instead, trust that the browser is loading the appropriate image for the user's viewport.

When to Seek Further Help

If you've tried all the steps above and the issue persists, the best course of action is to create a new topic on a community support forum like the WordPress.org support for GeneratePress. Be sure to include a link to the page where the problem is visible. This will allow others to inspect the page directly and provide more targeted assistance.

Remember, many issues related to specific blocks (like the Query Loop block or GenerateBlocks) are handled by their respective plugin support teams, not the theme itself.

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