Add Theme Support for HTML 5 Figures and Figcaptions to WordPress Images

Finally, WP has caught up to HTML5 when inserting images and galleries. Previously, images with captions were contained in <div> tags with the caption in a normal <p> tag.

Now you can get them all modern and semantic and awesome and stuff.

Just add this to your theme’s function.php file:

add_theme_support( 'html5', array( 'comment-list', 'comment-form', 'search-form', 'gallery', 'caption' ))

The array bit there handles which types of elements should get HTML5. So if you’re just looking for galleries, and captions, delete the other items. Like this:

add_theme_support( 'html5', array( 'gallery', 'caption' ))

Note that if you’re not developing a theme, just modifying something existing, you’ll need to do some CSS updating, too. This article, and the comments section, won’t cover how to do that as every theme is different.

Up Next: How to Make a Paper Clip Using Pure CSS