The Pinterest Profile Cover: The Slot Almost Nobody Sets
There is a banner across the top of your profile, and if you have never chosen what goes in it Pinterest is choosing for you. Three options, where it gets cropped, and how to decide in a minute.
By Mia Bennett · Pinterest strategist
Go and look at your own Pinterest profile for a second.
There is a wide strip across the top, above your boards and under your name.
If you have never deliberately set it, Pinterest has filled it with a rotating selection of your recent pins.
Which sounds fine, and mostly is, right up until the afternoon you save six pins about bathroom tiling for your own house and your decorating profile greets every new visitor with somebody else’s grout.
I have watched this happen to a real account.
It was not catastrophic.
It was just a completely avoidable first impression made by an algorithm on behalf of someone who did not know the slot existed.
Nothing set
Pinterest picks recent pins for you. Random, and often off-brand.
A chosen board
The board you most want a visitor to open, on repeat.
A made image
One banner saying what you do. The only fully controlled option.
Bar length is how much control you have over what a first-time visitor sees.
The three options
Leaving it on automatic
Pinterest picks from your recent activity.
It is not random exactly, but it is not yours, and it changes without telling you.
It is the default and it is the worst of the three for the simple reason that it is the only one you do not control.
If your account is tightly focused and you only ever save on-topic things, the damage is small.
If you use the same account to save wallpaper for your kitchen, it is a liability.
Featuring one board
You choose a board and its pins fill the strip.
Free, takes about twenty seconds, and it is where I would start for most people.
The trick is choosing the board that answers "what is this account for?" fastest, which is usually not your biggest board.
Biggest tends to mean oldest, and oldest tends to be from before you knew what you were doing.
Pick the board you would want somebody to open first — the same logic that decides which boards go in your top row.
A made image
A single banner you designed, saying what you do.
The only option with complete control, and the only one that can carry words.
This is what you want if you sell one clear thing — a shop, a course, a service.
"Hand-thrown stoneware, made in Devon" across the top of a profile does a job no arrangement of pins can do.
It is also the most work, which is why it is third on the list rather than first.
Availability moves around
Pinterest has shuffled what this slot is called and what it can hold several times over the years — showcase, cover, featured board — and what you see may not match a tutorial written eighteen months ago. Go by what is in your own profile edit screen today, not by a screenshot. The reasoning below holds whichever version you have got.
Where it gets cropped, which changes the design
This is the part people get wrong, and it is the same trap as board names being truncated: the thing is designed on a laptop and consumed on a phone.
cropped on a phonealways visiblecropped on a phone
Text in the outer thirds is text most of your visitors will never see.
A wide banner on a narrow screen is cropped toward the centre.
Anything you put in the outer thirds — which is where people instinctively put logos and taglines, because that is where there is room — is invisible to the majority of your visitors.
So: text in the middle, always.
Logo in the middle if you want it seen.
Treat the left and right thirds as a nice texture that some people get and nobody depends on.
If you can only remember one thing from this post, that is the one, because it is the one that silently wastes an afternoon of design work.
How to decide, in about a minute
1
Do you sell one thing?
Then a made banner naming it beats anything else.
2
Do you sell several?
Feature the board that leads to the best of them.
3
Are you still figuring it out?
Feature your strongest board and revisit in a month.
The reason this is a decision rather than a preference is that it depends on how focused the account already is.
A one-product account should say the product.
A multi-product account cannot say all of them without saying nothing, so it should point at its best door instead.
And an account still working out what it is should not spend an afternoon designing a banner about a thing it might not be doing in March.
That last case is genuinely the most common and the advice for it is the least satisfying: feature your strongest board, get on with making pins, and revisit when you know.
There is no version of this where a beautiful banner rescues an account that has not decided what it is about.
If you are making an image
- Say one thing. A banner with three messages on it has none. What do you make, and for whom — that is the whole brief.
- Big type. It is rendered small and read fast. If it needs squinting on a phone it is decoration, not communication.
- Middle third only for anything that matters, per the crop above.
- Match your pins. A cover in a completely different palette from your pins makes the profile feel like two accounts. Your pin colour choices are the palette to borrow from.
- No small print. URLs, taglines, prices, "est. 2019" — none of it survives the size it is displayed at.
And do not put your logo in the cover and your logo in the profile picture.
That is the same information twice in the two most visible places on the page.
One of them should be doing something else.
Honestly, how much does this matter?
Less than the text fields, and I would rather be straight about it than sell you an afternoon.
The cover is not searched.
Nobody finds you because of it.
It affects the impression made on people who already arrived — which is worth something real, because those visitors are the ones deciding whether to follow you, and the profile is where that decision happens.
So it belongs in the same tier as the profile picture: worth twenty minutes, not worth an evening, and worth doing after the fields that get people there in the first place.
The forty-minute running order puts the text first for exactly this reason, and if you have not done your display name yet, close this tab and go and do that instead.
It is four minutes and it is worth more than everything on this page.
The bit that decides whether anyone sees it
A cover only matters if people reach the profile, and they reach the profile from pins that got found.
Which comes back to the same thing every time: whether the phrases in your names, titles and descriptions are phrases people actually type.
PinPinterest will show you what is genuinely searched in your niche and how crowded each phrase is, which is the difference between a profile that gets visitors and a profile that gets a lovely banner nobody sees.
The niches we track will tell you how well covered your corner is before you start.
Make sure the profile is worth decorating — get the traffic first
The account with the grout, by the way, now features a board called "Small Bathroom Ideas".
Same subject, chosen on purpose, and it has been the same for two years.
#pinterest profile#design#branding#profile seo
More in Profile7 other guides in this categorySee all I’ve spent years growing Pinterest accounts from zero. This is the stuff I wish someone had told me sooner — no fluff, just what actually moves traffic.
