When my friend Virginia shared her blog post on Facebook, about excellent Ada Lovelace Day posters for women in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math), she apologized for the image displayed with the post:
I can’t find the place to make Facebook stop inserting this image every time I post from by blog.
Which isn’t uncommon, based on how often I see the question on WordPress.com forums as well as self-hosted WordPress forums:
Why is the wrong image displaying when I share my post on Facebook?
I was curious what was going on, so I chatted with Virginia about her WordPress site and what her setup was.
After I asked four questions, we were able to track down the issue, and get it resolved quickly.
4 Questions to Ask When Facebook Displays the Wrong Image
1. Are you on self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com?
If your site is hosted on WordPress.com, Facebook selects an image to display with your post/page based on whether you’re sharing the home page of your site or an individual post or page.
If you’re sharing the home page, often referred to as the front page, the featured image is displayed.
If the front page doesn’t have a featured image, your site icon is displayed.
For posts and non-home pages, Facebook will select which image to display in the following order:
- Featured image
- Images inserted in the post, recommended from top to bottom
When no images are used in the post, WordPress.com recommends a transparent image.
But be aware: Facebook will look throughout the post/page for other images, including images in widgets or the header.
Here’s what you need to know about WordPress.com and Facebook image thumbnails.
With self-hosted WordPress sites, the process is similar, but there are several other issues (and plugins) that may affect what image is displayed.
2. Did you add a featured image for the post?
Related to the first question, if you haven’t added a featured image for the post, Facebook won’t know what image to display, and may choose a different image than you prefer.
To eliminate that issue, select a featured image for your post (dependent on whether your theme supports featured images).
When you select the image, make sure it meets Facebook’s image size requirements.
The best practices (as of October 27, 2021) recommend your image has a minimum width of 1080 pixels.
3. Have you checked the post with the Facebook Debugger?
When you share your post on Facebook for the first time, Facebook stores images in a cache.
Which means sometimes that image in cache will be used as the image when you share your post on Facebook.
To make sure Facebook updates its cache, use the free Facebook URL Sharing Debugger online tool to check the URL of the post.
Note: you’ll need to be logged into Facebook to use the tool.
Look at the setting for og:image to confirm Facebook is selecting the correct image.
If that’s not the correct image, select the “Scrape again” button to force Facebook to re-scrape the post.
4. Are you using Yoast SEO plugin?
The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most popular plugins for search engine optimization. In addition, it provides social media optimization.
If you’ve installed Yoast SEO, you’ll want to check the default image setting.
That’s the setting where you designate a default image, when a post doesn’t have any images.
Note: other SEO plugins offer a similar feature to designate a default image when your post/page doesn’t have a featured image.
What We Discovered
Once Virginia and I chatted, I learned she was using Yoast SEO on her self-hosted WordPress website.
We quickly discovered it was the default image setting in the Yoast SEO plugin causing the wrong image to display on Facebook.
Virginia was glad to know where to change the setting:
5 stars to @redcrew, who is awesome!
— Virginia DeBolt (@vdebolt) May 9, 2016
Summary
Getting the correct image to display on Facebook when you share your posts is dependent on a number of factors.
With the four questions I outline in this post, you can quickly troubleshoot the cause and get the correct image to display.
Do you use any other methods to track down the problem? Share your recommendations in the comments.
Originally published May 9, 2016. Updated with new information October 27, 2021.
