Images I upload are blurry

it will either be because you don’t have a high enough resolution uploaded or you are trying to display one of the smaller versions of the uplaoded image at a larger size.

try again with a large, hi-res image and then post the url of the image here (right click on the image and copy its location and full name)

That’s not why. It doesn’t matter what I upload, every image becomes somewhat but noticeably pixelated no matter the size.

Take a look under Tools > Site Health. Are there any anomalies with regard to images? Possibly also missing PHP libs? If so, you may need to contact your hoster’s support team.

Please also note the following:
WordPress automatically resizes images (including the original image) when they are uploaded if they are larger than 2560 pixels. I don’t know whether .com also does this, but .org has it activated by default. This could cause images to be “degraded” during upload if the server-side PHP libs for images are not correct.

Furthermore: the theme you are using always outputs images in suitable dimensions for the output in the frontend. Images (so-called thumbnails) should therefore already be generated from the original in the background. The theme should then use these, e.g. 150×150 pixels – if your theme uses smaller images for this than are actually output, it can also look blurred.

There aren’t. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve tried a bunch of different sizes, doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve also tried switching to the same theme as the default one on wordpress.com.

Maybe it’s an issue with the hosting provider? Not sure what to check there. The CDN appears to be disabled so that can’t be it. I guess I have to upload the images to another place and then paste the link.. seems like an unnecessary hassle though and it’d mean I wouldn’t get any traffic through google images.

Yes, it may be due to the PHP libs for image generation from the hoster. Please contact their support.

I tried contacting them and they said there’s nothing on their end which should be causing image compression.

I’ve tried purging the CDN’s cache. Made sure there are no image compression options enabled.

Any other ideas would be welcome.