Overview
- Enable Facebook Open Graph capability
- Enable Featured images
- Select a suitable image
- Clear the Facebook cache for the URL
Enable Facebook Open Graph capability
A number of plugins provide support for Open Graph capability, including Jetpack and WordPress SEO. You can check to see if the tags are being created by:- Viewing your page
- Use
View page source
or your browser’s equivalent to view the source of the page - Search for
og:image
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.oik-plugins.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Share-to-Facebook.jpg" />
og:image
is present but the image is not the one that Facebook is using then you will need to clear the Facebook cache for the URL.
Note: If you’re using Jetpack Publicize or Sharing, then you should see a number of Open Graph meta tags.
If you’re also using WordPress SEO and have checked Add Open Graph meta data
( SEO > Social > Facebook ) then you will see that the tags have actually been created by WordPress SEO.
Enable Featured images
Both Jetpack and WordPress SEO will use your featured image to create the Facebook Open Graph data. If there are someproperty=og:
tags but not the og:image
one then it would suggest that you have not defined a Featured image.
If your post type does not support Featured images then you can use the oik-types plugin so that it does.
Select a suitable image
The image that you define as your featured image should be:- At least 200px by 200px
- Accessible from Facebook. e.g. Publicly available to site visitors and not password protected
- It used to be that it should have an aspect ratio not greater than 3:1
Clear the Facebook cache for the URL
If you change the post or page so that the image that Facebook should use now different from the one that it cached when it first scraped the URL, you can attempt to override this behaviour by clearing Facebook’s cache.- Open the Facebook debugger
- Paste in the full URL of the content to be shared. Don’t use a shortlink, they don’t work.
- Click on the Debug button.
- The Open Graph Object Debugger will show you the image that will be used
Related reading
- Facebook debug
- Props to SEO Smarty for pointing me to the Facebook debug tool.
- oik-types
- [bw_fields]
- Props also to Share Buttons by AddToAny FAQ for also mentioning Facebook debug.