Do you own a blog? Do you share your articles regularly on Facebook?
Well, then you must have noticed that sometimes Facebook does not show the right thumbnail for your shared article.
This tends to happen a lot more if you are sharing your blog post from a WordPress website.
So, you need to fix this and there are multiple ways in which you can do that.
Why does Facebook pick up the wrong Thumbnail?
Well, before you go ahead and start fixing your thumbnail issues, it is always good to know a bit why this happens.
Well, there are more than enough reasons for Facebook not to pick up the
right thumbnail for your post.
Amongst those reasons, there is one common reason that troubles WordPress site owners the most.
Well, in case the featured image that you have chosen for your thumbnail is smaller than the other images, it can create issues for Facebook to detect the right image for your thumbnail.
By default, Facebook reads images from og tag (Open Graph) and if you have plugins like Yoast, you can expect it to add the same automatically to your WordPress site.
This can certainly prevent the issues of missing or wrong thumbnails.
Apart from this, the common reasons why you might be encountering this problem is due to the use of caching plugins, missing og meta tag for your thumbnails, CDN issues, etc.
Even if you use a debugging tool, it becomes really difficult for anyone to know the exact reason why your thumbnails are not being shown, or why Facebook is loading a wrong thumbnail.
This is because you will never get any specific kind of error message. So, how should you fix this Facebook thumbnail issue?
Below are the few tricks that might work for you and solve your problem.
Upload Facebook thumbnail image manually
When you share any blog or article on Facebook page, you can see the thumbnail added by Facebook.
In case you see that the thumbnail image is not right, you can choose to upload your actual thumbnail image to the post.
Once you upload the desired thumbnail image, you can view the image amongst your “photos” on Facebook.
Once you are done with the correction, you can choose to delete the photo. Rest assured that Facebook will show your thumbnail correctly even after you delete the original picture.
Well, do remember that this trick only works for posts that you share only. In case any other person shares your blog or article, then Facebook will still be showing the wrong thumbnail.
To solve this, you need to follow a different method.
Ask Facebook to use a particular image as your Thumbnail
To do this, you will need to have SEO Yoast plugin on your WordPress website. With the help of this plugin, you will be able to use a specific thumbnail image on Facebook.
While you write a new post, just scroll your editor page and you can find the Yoast meta box just below your editor.
Click on the “Social” tab. You will have a button to upload your thumbnail image for your Facebook shares.
Once you upload this image, this will solve most of the issues with the Facebook thumbnail. In case you have the same issue even after doing this, you might want to reset your Facebook cache.
Use the Facebook Debugging Tool
This debugging tool is to find issues with Facebook thumbnails. This mainly helps you to implement Facebook open graph on your WordPress site.
All you need to do is choose the post that you wish to share on Facebook, copy the URL, and paste it to the tool. It will come up with the error if any.
The most common error that the tool will notify you is: The image uploaded on Open Graph is not big enough.
The tool will also suggest an approximate size which would be good enough to consider the image as a thumbnail.
This error occurs because Facebook tends to choose the best size image that is larger than the original thumbnail image.
This tends to generate the error code that suggests you to upload a bigger image.
But do remember that if you use the tool once again on the same URL, it will not show the error anymore and there is no technical reason behind it.
So, now that you know how you can solve issues with the Facebook thumbnails, it’s time that you start solving the Facebook thumbnail issues of your own.
Make sure that you try out the Yoast SEO plugin first, and in case it does not work well, you can try the Facebook debugging tool as well.
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