You upload the lovely title page of your resource; TPT shows a square with the top of your heading missing and half a clipart sun. Nothing's broken — TPT displays covers as squares, and your page is a rectangle, so the platform crops from the centre and hopes for the best. The centre of an 8.5×11 page is rarely where your title lives.
Place your whole rectangular page onto a square canvas and let white borders fill the sides. You keep every word, and the borders read as clean margin rather than mistake — plenty of high-selling stores do exactly this. It's a ten-second job with the right tool (below), and it's the right answer when your cover already exists as a PDF page.
Make a separate square cover image — same fonts and artwork as your resource, composed for 1:1 instead of letter ratio. It fills the whole tile, which looks stronger in search results, at the cost of maintaining one extra image per product. Worth it for your best sellers; overkill for a 50-product back catalogue, which is what Fix 1 is for.
Cropping deliberately — choosing which part of the rectangle survives — works only for photographic covers where no text is near the edges. For text-led covers (i.e. most TPT covers), some words always end up in the kill zone. If you're choosing what to sacrifice, you've already lost the click the title was supposed to earn.
Export each cover page as an image, run each through a fit-to-square resize at 750×750 or better, re-upload. It's mechanical — which means it's batchable, and the borders version of your whole store beats the cropped version of your whole store by exactly one afternoon of clicking.
Checked August 2026. Not affiliated with TPT (Teachers Pay Teachers).