ISSUE: After theme install, images are wrong size or too small

This is likely to happen if you do not regenerate thumbnails for images on your blog.

Here’s the issue: with your old theme, your blog feed and post pages were set to a particular width. Chances are, that width is not the same as your new EmPress theme. So, images need to be resized to fit the new theme.

Luckily, we’ve included an easy way for you to do this, using the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin (which we package with our themes).

Where the Regenerate Thumbnails prompt lives in your theme Customizer depends on when your theme was released. Follow the titles below to find the instructions that correspond to your theme.

HAYES & PEARL THEMES

1. Go to Appearance > Customize > Images & Retina Support. Scroll down, then click the blue Regenerate Thumbnails button.

2. A new screen will load with information on how regenerating thumbnails works. You can choose to regenerate thumbnails for all images on your blog (the first blue button below), or only for featured images, which are the images that appear on your home page, category, and archival pages (the second blue button below). We typically recommend starting with featured images only.

Note that if you have been creating content for a long time, you may have thousands of images to update. The process can take some time — we recommend letting the process run in one browser window/tab, and open a new one to continue customizing your site. You can also use the Skip regenerating existing correctly sized thumbnails option to prevent resizing images that are already good to go.

3. After clicking the regenerate thumbnails button, a progress bar will load showing you what percentage of images have been resized. Again, keep in mind that if your blog has years worth of images, this may take some time to complete.

4. Once the process completes, the images on your blog should all be the proper size! That’s it! It’s back to blogging business as usual.

RANIA, PRESIDIO, MIRAMAR, BREVIER, AND ARCHER THEMES

1. Go to  Appearance > Customize > Welcome to [theme name]!

2. Click on the blue  Regenerate Thumbnails button.

3. A new screen will load with information on how regenerating thumbnails works. You can choose to regenerate thumbnails for all images on your blog (the first blue button below), or only for featured images, which are the images that appear on your home page, category, and archival pages (the second blue button below). We typically recommend starting with featured images only.

Note that if you have been creating content for a long time, you may have thousands of images to update. The process can take some time — we recommend letting the process run in one browser window/tab, and open a new one to continue customizing your site. You can also use the Skip regenerating existing correctly sized thumbnails option to prevent resizing images that are already good to go.

4. A progress bar will load showing you what percentage of images have been resized. Again, keep in mind that if your blog has years worth of images, this may take a while to complete.

5. Once the process completes, the images on your blog should all be the proper size! That’s it! It’s back to blogging business as usual.

TROUBLESHOOTING REGENERATE THUMBNAILS

ISSUE: THE PROCESS SEEMS TO STALL OUT OR NEVER FINISH

Try opening your live site, holding down the shift key, and clicking the refresh button at the same time (this clear's the browser cache.) As you click around the site, if you notice your images have all resized, you're good to go. If the images haven't resized, the process may simply need more time. You may wish to cancel the process, and start running it again in the evening, so it can run overnight. This will be pertinent to bloggers with years worth of content.

ISSUE: THE PROCESS HAS MADE THE REST OF YOUR SITE RUN VERY SLOWLY

This is an issue of hosting, unfortunately. If you have an inexpensive shared hosting plan, and were already reaching resource allocation limits on that plan, you may notice performance issues on your live site. This is especially true if you're running the process during the middle of the day, when lots of readers are visiting your site. You may wish to run the process overnight instead. Better yet, consider upgrading to a Managed WP hosting plan, which can better accommodate your resource needs.

ISSUE: The process seems to not resize images that are very old

While there's no hard and fast rule, generally speaking, if you have more than 1000+ posts, you may experience issues simply due to the sheer volume of images that need to be resized. Remember, resizing isn't just about each individual image — it's about re-cropping that single image to fit the multitude of media sizes available within your theme, so it looks good no matter where it feeds into. We recommend only resizing featured images if possible. You can also run the process a few times, and then regenerate featured images on individual posts as needed.

ISSUE: PROCESS RAN SUCCESSFULLY, BUT SOME IMAGES STILL DON'T LOOK RIGHT.

Seeing images that still look too small or do not properly fill their image containers indicates that the image was uploaded at a dimension so small, it will not look good with the theme. That's because if image proportions are not large enough (especially for Retina displays), the quality will look so poor that the thumbnail regenerator will skip over them. For images that fall into this category, we recommend re-uploading a new, larger image in their place.