Why Facebook is Not Picking up The Thumbnail Image
There are many reasons that can prevent Facebook from correctly guessing the right thumbnail image. One of the most common reason is having multiple images set in the og:image tag where your featured image is smaller than rest of the images.
Facebook uses Open Graph (og) tags, and many WordPress plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast automatically adds them to your site to prevent missing thumbnail issue.
Among other causes are caching plugins, CDN issues, missing open graph meta tag for the thumbnail image. etc. It is really hard to guess what’s causing the issue because there are no specific error messages displayed when using the debugging tool.
Let’s take a look at how to fix the incorrect facebook thumbnail issue.
Manually Uploading your Thumbnail Image
If you are sharing an article on your Facebook page, and it does not pick up the correct thumbnail, then you can click on the upload link to upload the image you want to use.
Note: The image you upload is stored in the photos section of your Facebook page. You can delete the image from photos if you want. Facebook will continue to show the image you uploaded as the thumbnail for the article in your timeline.
However this solution does not affect other users. Meaning if other users share your article, then it may still show the incorrect thumbnail.
But the next fix takes care of that part.
Explicitly Tell Facebook To Use Thumbnail of Your Choice
If you are using WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, then you can easily set a specific thumbnail image for Facebook.When writing a post, scroll down to WordPress SEO meta box below the post editor and then click on the social tab. There you will see a button to upload a thumbnail image for Facebook.
Simply add your Facebook Thumbnail image there, and this will fix the issue in most cases.
However if it continues to show the incorrect thumbnail, then you may have to reset the Facebook cache.
Using Facebook Debug Tool
Facebook debug tool is the easiest way to troubleshoot issues with Facebook open graph implementation on your WordPress site.
Simply copy the URL of your WordPress post and paste in the debugger tool. The most common error that you will see is
Provided og:image is not big enough. Please use an image that’s at least 200×200 px. Image ‘http://example.com/uploads/2014/06/some-image-from-article.jpg'; will be used instead.
What happens here is that Facebook uses their best guess method to pick up a thumbnail image. If there are larger images inside an article, then Facebook will use those images instead. For some unexplained reason, pressing the debug button again on the same URL makes this error disappear.
We hope this article helped you resolve Facebook incorrect / no thumbnail issue in WordPress. To make it easier for your users to share your articles, we would recommend you to install Floating Social Bar. It adds a sticky social bar on top your articles, encouraging users to share and tweet your content.
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