If you are a WordPress blogger, you will know that moment of excitement when posting your latest offering to your readers via Facebook. You have carefully crafted the words, you paste the link and then Facebook selects an image from 3 weeks ago that isn’t about your latest piece at all. No matter how much you try, it doesn’t want to work.
So why doesn’t Facebook load the picture you want and what can you do to fix it?
The first thing to check is that your images meet the Facebook requirements:
- Size – must be a minimum of 200 pixels on each side
- Aspect ratio – if the ratio of height to width (or vice versa) is more than 3 to 1 (e.g. a panoramic view) Facebook will ignore it
If you’ve met these criteria and Facebook is showing an old image, then it could be that Facebook has cached the page without your latest image in it, so head over to:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/
and insert the URL. This will force the Facebook Open Graph engine to rescrape your page. If you scroll down, you can see what images Facebook has decided are relevant to your post.
If the images are still not the ones you want to see, it is possible to explicitly tell Facebook which items Open Graph should scrape from the page using the meta tags. For example:
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://joinourjourney.redfern.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rebekah.jpg” />
tells Facebook to use that specific image from the page rather than any other images it finds in its scrape of the content.
The best way to add this to your WordPress pages is to use an SEO extension that supports Open Graph. For example WordPress SEO by Yoast is free (there is a premium version but you won’t need it for this fix). It automatically adds the Open Graph meta tags to your posts so that Facebook will then correctly use your images. It will pick the Featured image first, images within the post second and finally other images on the page or that you have set manually for the site.
Add Yoast via the Plugins->Add New button and then once installed and activated, click on the Social menu item on the Facebook tab and make sure “Add Open Graph meta data” is selected.
If you test an old page you may need to visit Facebook Open Graph debug tool again to refresh the cache.
Happy blogging.
I currently have no title or image that pops up when I share the URL on fb. I don’t think it’s always been like that. I checked that fb publisher link and I’m not sure how to fix the problem.
The most likely is that your Open Graph meta tags are blank or our misleading.
Install WordPress SEO from Yoast. Then make sure that Add Open Graph meta data is selected.
This will then add the Open Graph fields to your header so that they are seen by Facebook.
Andy