How to ensure your WordPress post and pages images work on Facebook

Ever posted your WordPress URL on facebook, and some of these happen:

1. the wrong image appears on facebook
2. the menu image for mobile appears on facebook
3. no image appears on facebook
4. you have a text only blog post, and you want your logo to appear on facebook, but alas nothing appears
5. you change your image in your post, but facebook keeps using the old one
6. The wrong text appears on facebook
7. The wrong title appears on facebook, or you want to change it

It can be really frustrating playing with facebook – and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t

Well here are the things you need to know:

• you can put ‘og’ tags on your page that facebook will use to better organise your content
• og stands for ‘open graph’
• and yes, there is a plug in for that. I use ‘OA Open Graph for FB’, but there are others.
• facebook only takes 1 look at your WordPress page/post, and remembers the content. It doesn’t look at your WordPress website for every facebook user – it just serves the content it has remembered.
• the you need this URL  https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/, it does a few things:
  • firstly, you can check what your WordPress page/post is going to look like before posting on facebook
  • if you do change something on your WordPress page/post (like images, tags, text), you can ‘fetch new scrape’ – which gets a new copy of your page
  • you can see what facebook has remembered about your WordPress page/post
  • it will give you some tips as to why it can’t use your image
  • it will show you everything it read from your page, you’ll then understand how it’s using the ‘og’ tags on your WordPress page/post from the plugin.
• that the image needs to be at least 300×300

By Scott Farrell on March 16th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress