When a new visitor lands on your blog it is customary to provide a picture of yourself or your brand. Most advice bloggers will agree that if your blog is personal in nature then a picture of yourself would be preferrable.
The Jetpack plugin for WordPress lets you easily add a Gravatar widget to your site. Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) is a personal page attached to your email address. You can add a picture, links to websites, as well as any social media account links. Your Gravatar is like a personal listing all about you.
In this article we'll show you how you can update your Gravatar image and add it to your WordPress blog.
How to Create a Gravatar
If you have already created your Gravatar, you can skip this section.
- Go to Gravatar
- Sign up with Gravatar by creating a WordPress.com account (this will require an email address, username, and password
- Click Continue
- Wait for the confirmation email and click Activate when it arrives
- Click the Sign in to Gravatar button once you are redirected
- Click Sign in at the top right corner of the Gravatar home page
- Click Add a new image on your account page
You will now have an avatar image associated with your email address. More and more websites support Gravatar now, so this image will follow you around the Internet. Make sure it’s a good one.
How to Add a New Image to Gravatar
There may come a time when you need to update the image you’ve used on your Gravatar. This is easy to do. First, you will just need to log back into your Gravatar account using the WordPress.com login credentials you created before. Under your profile, you will see an option to Add a new image. Here, you can add your new image and select it as your primary.
Adding the Gravatar Widget to Your WordPress Site
Now that you know how create and/or update your Gravatar image, we will continue with adding the Gravatar to your WordPress site.
- Log into your WordPress Dashboard
- Under Appearance click Widgets
- Drag and drop the Gravatar widget to your desired widget area
That’s it! Your Gravatar will now greet your site visitors as they arrive on your site.
Using Your Gravatar Around the Web
Now that you have created your Gravatar and know how to update your picture, you may see it occasionally pop up when you log into different accounts or create new accounts in different places. Many sites honor the Gravatar as your primary identity for surfing the web (Globally Recongized Avatar). This makes a Gravatar a good thing to have even if you already use your Facebook or Google account for most of your web surfing.
