Last Tuesday I pushed a new playlist post to the homepage and… white rectangle of doom. I’d forgotten the featured image again, and the grid looked like a broken chess board.

30 min of Photoshop? Nah. I built a micro-plugin instead.

ACL Featured Image Plus does exactly one thing: if a post has no thumbnail, it slips in your backup image, overlays your brand color at whatever opacity you set, and bails out before WordPress even blinks. No shortcodes, no extra queries, no “optimize this” nags. It’s literally a single filter on post_thumbnail_html and one 3 KB CSS file that only loads when needed.

Setup (takes 27 seconds):

1. Upload.
2. Pick fallback image.
3. Choose color + transparency.
4. Save beer money.

Works with block themes, classic themes, FSE, RSS, REST, your cousin’s headless remix, doesn’t matter. The markup stays native, so PageSpeed won’t throw shade.

And yeah, it’s free for ACL members. If you’re running any of our themes (Tracks, FSEero, whatever) it’s already skin-tested; drop it in and forget it exists.

Grab it from your dashboard or git clone if you like to read code in the bath.

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Keep designing. Let the plugin worry about the holes.