WordPress: Media — uploading, organising and the most common mistake

Media is where everything you have uploaded lives: images, PDF documents, videos.

Two views

At the top left there are two icons — grid and list.

The grid is nice for browsing. The list is more useful — it shows the name, who uploaded it, when, and which post it is used in.

Why there are no folders

That is the first thing everyone looks for. Instead of folders, WordPress offers search and filters: by date, by type, by text in the name.

That is why file names matter. facade-shtip-2026.jpg can be found. IMG_20260804_123456.jpg — can’t.

Rename files before uploading. After the upload, WordPress keeps the old name in the image’s address.

The fields next to the image

When you click on an image:

Alternative text (Alt) — a description for screen readers and for Google. This one matters. Short and accurate: “Renovated facade of a building in Štip”.

If the image is purely decorative, leave it empty — that is more correct than made-up text.

Title, Caption, Description — less important. The caption is shown on the website; the others aren’t.

The most common mistake

Uploading straight from a phone or camera.

That image is 4,000 pixels wide and 4 megabytes. It is displayed in a box 800 pixels wide — but the visitor downloads all four megabytes.

Ten of those on a page come to 40 MB. That is a website nobody will wait for on mobile data.

Before uploading: shrink it to at most 1,600 pixels wide and compress it. It’s free at squoosh.app, in the browser — nothing is uploaded to someone else’s server.

The different sizes

WordPress makes several copies of every image — thumbnail, medium, large. That is why one uploaded image takes up more space than you think.

That is a good thing: the website serves the smallest one that fits. But if you upload huge originals, the copies are huge too.

Deleting — carefully

If you delete an image that is used in a post, a broken image is left behind. WordPress does not warn you.

In list view there is an “Uploaded to” column — check it before deleting.

PDF documents

They can be uploaded just like images and linked to.

But: a PDF with a menu or a price list doesn’t do well in search and is hard to read on a phone. If the content matters, put it on a page as normal text.