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How to Fix Facebook Incorrect Thumbnail Issue in WordPress

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Have you noticed incorrect post thumbnails when you share your articles on Facebook?

It’s a common error that beginners often complain about. It’s not always clear how to get Facebook to display the right thumbnail.

In this article, we will show you how to fix the Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue in WordPress.

Fixing the Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue in WordPress

Why Is Facebook Not Picking Up the Thumbnail Image?

There are many reasons why Facebook might not correctly display the featured image on your post. One of the most common reasons is having multiple images set in the og:Image tag where your featured image is smaller than the other images.

Facebook uses Open Graph (og) tags, and many WordPress plugins like AIOSEO and Yoast SEO automatically add them to your WordPress website to prevent missing thumbnails.

Some other causes are caching plugins, CDN conflicts, or a missing open graph meta tag for the thumbnail image.

It’s really hard to guess what’s causing the issue because there are no specific error messages displayed when using the debugging tool.

That being said, let’s take a look at some ways to fix the incorrect Facebook thumbnail issue:

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If you prefer written instructions, then just keep reading.

Choosing Your Facebook Thumbnail With AIOSEO

One way you can show the thumbnail you want is with the free AIOSEO plugin. It is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and allows you to easily optimize your content for search engines and social media websites.

We will show you how to do this with the free version of AIOSEO. If you want to unlock more SEO features and get more traffic to your site, then you should check out AIOSEO Pro. See our full AIOSEO review for more details.

First, you need to install and activate AIOSEO. Here’s our full guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After you have installed the plugin, you can easily change the Facebook thumbnail when writing a post. Just scroll down to the AIOSEO Settings meta box below the post editor and then click on the ‘Social’ tab.

AIOSEO Social settings tab

A little further down the page, you will see an ‘Image Source’ dropdown where you can select the thumbnail image for Facebook.

For example, you can use your featured image or upload a custom one instead.

Choose which WordPress image to use as your Facebook thumbnail

Once you add your Facebook thumbnail image there, you need to update your post. This will fix the issue in most cases.

Here’s what our post looks like when shared on Facebook:

All In One SEO fixed thumbnail

Pro Tip: If this doesn’t work, then make sure you have cleared your WordPress cache and refreshed the post in the Facebook debug tool, as mentioned below in this article.

Choosing Your Facebook Thumbnail With Yoast SEO Plugin

The Yoast SEO plugin also comes with the ability to add a custom Facebook thumbnail to each post or page.

Simply install and activate the Yoast SEO Plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, it’s time to set up a Facebook thumbnail into whatever post you want.

Yoast Facebook featured image

When writing a post, scroll down to the Yoast 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.

Here’s what the Facebook thumbnail looks like for our How to Start a Blog article:

Yoast Facebook thumbnail image

Using Facebook Debug Tool to Clear the Cache

If you have added the right thumbnail, and Facebook is still not showing the right thumbnail, then the issue is related to caching.

First, you need to make sure that you clear the page cache in WordPress.

After that, you need to reset the cache in Facebook using their debug tool.

The Facebook debug tool is the easiest way to troubleshoot Facebook thumbnail issues. Simply copy the URL of your WordPress post and paste it into the debugger tool.

Facebook debug tool

After that, click on the ‘Scrape Again’ button, and Facebook will update the thumbnail for your post. Sometimes, you may have to click the ‘Scrape Again’ button twice.

Expert Guides on Using Social Media in WordPress

Now that you know how to fix incorrect thumbnails on Facebook, you may like to see some other guides related to using social media on WordPress:

We hope this article helped you resolve the Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to add social share buttons in WordPress or our expert picks for the best business phone services for small business.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

122 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

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  2. Yolanda says

    I’m hoping someone might be able to help me. I am having real trouble sharing to Facebook (but only in my last 2 posts). When I share it does not show a title or an image.

    I went to Facbook Debugger and this is the result:

    This is my article:

    i tried the fixes above in Yoast – but it doesn’t help. Any ideas what I can do based on the feedback form Facebook? THANK YOU.

    • Matthew says

      If you are having weird issues like this, a lot of times it could be that multiple plugins OR the theme you are using are conflicting with each other in trying to establish og: (open graph) tags.

      I had a very similar issue and it was my theme. I had to disable it’s OG stuff and then yoast worked perfectly.

      • taylor says

        I’m also having this issue, and use Yoast and WP. However, I think it is actually a Facebook issue; Facebook allows me to upload another photo to use, and I can use the second photo if I want to set up a post with carousel images, but I can’t deselect the auto-pulled photo and use only the uploaded photo. I have found that by manually adding in on yoast the specific photo I want used on facebook to the article itself, this works — but only this method works for me now. What a pain!

  3. Abdur-razzaq says

    Thumbnails are not coming up when i want to share post on Facebook. It shows an empty box with no image. Kindly help out please, am confused and frustrated already. You can check it out at Thank You

  4. Chrissy says

    So I just downloaded the Yoast plugin for a client and it looks like they have removed the open graph feature from their free plugin – which is a shame! You can add pictures on specific pages and posts, but you used to be able to add a specific image for the home page.

  5. Amanda says

    This a great article, helped me a lot with this issue regarding the thumbnails within facebook, moreover the plugin SEO WordPress by Yoast include very usefull tools to improve the content in the blog.
    Thank you so much!

  6. Nicole says

    Oh thank you SO MUCH for this. I recently deactivated the “Publicize” setting in my Jetpack plugin because it was causing issues on the landing page for my newly-launched eBook (plus Publicize hadn’t been working properly for weeks, so I didn’t think I needed it). But then when I went to share my latest post today on Facebook I came up against this issue. I can only assume it’s because no more Publicize. But your Yoast tip worked perfectly for me. Thank you!

  7. Sharon Stiles says

    Facebook doesn’t like small images. I think the minimum it will show automatically is 200 x 200 pixels but it prefers larger ones. This is a problem I regularly have because I usually use smaller pictures to keep load times down.

  8. Katie says

    This is a great article. Thank you so much. Tried various debugging methods to fix my image problems. Yoast SEO has been the only method that has worked.

  9. UgoChukwu says

    My issue is not really with facebook, or my site, but I myself. As I was developing my site and creating some test posts, I used one particular image as thumbnail, some are without feature image, in that case, it will take the one I used as default image in All In One SEO plugin. Now am done with production, Make some necessary changes on the image, but the firts one has already been registered on facebook cache that further sharing of those posts will call up the old image.
    I have been able to debug some posts and pages on facebook using debug tool, but the posts and pages are too much for me to be debuging them one by one.
    Is there a way I can debug the whole site at once?

  10. Aziz says

    When I share my website like wpbeginner.com on my facebook wall, not showing any thumbnail and description. any tutorial for fix this issues? Thanks

  11. Avishai says

    Hello everyone,
    I have a problem sharing my posts on facebook from my wordpress site.
    When I share it to facebook I get some wierd Japaneese picture.
    I’ve checked solutions online but none of them worked for me. here is a list of what i’ve done:
    deactivated all the plugins to see that there is no conflict
    downloaded the following plugins (downloaded and activated one at a time of course):
    Facebook Thumb Fixer
    ultimate-social-media-plus
    mashsharer
    open-graph-protocol-framework
    wp-facebook-open-graph-protocol
    facebook Plugin
    simple-facebook-og-image
    Facebook Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags
    All in one SEO
    Yoast Seo (Enabled the facebook button)
    *removed cache from the browser
    *tried the facebook developer including fetching again.
    * tried to paste the link directly to facebook
    * tried to put feature image (there are pictures also in the media library)
    * tried to share a brand new post, same results
    *Uploaded the picture with their desired dimentions of 1200*630

    Again and again im getting the message that og:image og:title and are missing

    Please help if you can, i dont know what to do anymore.

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Hi Avishai,

      Try deactivating and deleting all plugins. Delete all themes and then download a fresh copy of Twenty Sixteen or Twenty Seventeen default theme. Upload the default theme to your site. Use Facebook developer tools to see if you are still getting the Japanese title and image.

      Thoroughly check your WordPress folders and files to see if there is any suspicious file.

      Admin

  12. Jacqi says

    I’m having a problem I cant resolve. When I share my post to social media, the text all shows up with no problem but my thumbnail picture never shows up. I dont even get a wrong picture or a gray box where a picture should be. I only get the text. Ive tried adding open graph plugins, Ive tried debugging on facebook which grabs everything except the picture, Ive tried loading a picture into the SEO plugin to fall back on, Ive spent hours google searching for solutions. Everything on my sight appears to work fine except this one thing and nothing Ive tried works. Help!

  13. Jacob says

    For the last three days I am having trouble with sharing my new posts on FB. The thumb image refuses to show up and I cannot figure out why – mostly because I am a newbie!. However, I am able to share older posts correctly eg and not the a new post
    Spent most of the last three days reading through all the existing information on this subject but I am yet to find a fix.

    Would appreciate any good suggestions to solve this. Thanks.

    • Jacob says

      For the last few days I have been unable to share my new posts on FB with the thumbnail image. However, I am able to share some of my older posts correctly. I have tried just about everything but there is no remedy. Any tips on what could be wrong? I am using the Yoast Plugin.

      Thanks.

  14. Cathy says

    this worked for me BUT i have one more question…

    if i am only changing the TITLE of my thumbnail, I do not have a different url and i just need the title to change…since i don’t have a url i can’t put it into the facebook bugfix thing and i can’t get it to change…

  15. Cormael says

    Explicitly Tell Facebook To Use Thumbnail of Your Choice → now we are talking, working like a charm, thank you ♥ WordPress SEO rocks!

  16. kashif says

    AccessPress Facebook Auto Post this error please fix connection timed out after 10001 milliseconds facebook

  17. Beni Iskandar says

    I am using featured image as my thumbnails post. when I share my article to facebook i found that my pic not show as big as actual size and only show one og:image.

    In other case i found that some blog not using this featured image article, all file image on article show in meta tag list og:image. I see that this preview on facebook showing all image too, it look’s like simple tutorial but without text.

    I want to setting up my blog like this, show all meta ogimage file list not just one and remove og:imagewidth and height.

  18. Lakshmi Geeth says

    Thank you so much for this article, I did not know that Yoast could do so much more. It indeed helped me a lot. Thanks guys.

  19. Massimiliano says

    I tried every king of plugins and finally by only using the Facebook Debug Tool, pressing Fetch new scrape information button, after i paste the link to the article with thumb image problem in Input URL field, completely solved the problem for my website http://www.ioblog.eu
    Thank you for your help!

  20. James says

    Just wanted to thank you guys for the excellent article. I’ve only encountered this problem fairly recently and couldn’t figure out why facebook was grabbing images from my sidebar instead of the WordPress featured image. What was really throwing me off was that some of my posts shared flawlessly to Facebook with the Featured Image while others did not.

    After reading THIS article, I learned that size indeed matters. At least to Facebook. I also learned that you could do other stuff with Yoast that I had never even knew existed before. Thanks guys!

  21. Jaswinder says

    Very interesting article and glad that I found it!

    I am facing the same problem and today I installed Yoast SEO and I am able to share blog posts on face book with the correct image.

  22. mitchpowell says

    I have Yoast free version, and it wasn’t writing the og:image to my head, no matter what. I finally just created a new header.php in my child theme folder and hard-coded the meta tag there. Now it works okay when I go to the FB debugger tool.

    I just had to wonder why every place I looked on the web for why it wasn’t doing it, I couldn’t find an answer. Here in these comments is where I come closest to finding others with a similar problem. All I can think of is that a different plugin may be conflicting with Yoast. (I’m using the now-no-longer-supported-by-Facebook “Official Facebook Plugin for WordPress”, and I think that might be the one. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about GitHub to get any help from the people there who are working with this plugin.)

    Anyway, hard-coding it into the header.php was the answer for me. HTH :D

    • "hard-coded the meta tag" says

      Can you provide the code to add to the header.php for the featured image to be used in the facebook share thanks!

  23. shehzan says

    And also, yoast seo plugin has social sharing setting at the bottom of the post edit page. u can always overwrite what facebooks displays for your post inside of facebook. when OGP tags are set, u can always use yoast settings to show the image and description of your choice.

    just tried these options and all work…

    Hope this helps :)

    • Overwriting the image url doesn't work says

      Thanks for the suggestion Shehzan but I have tried telling the plugin which image to grab by putting it’s url in the FB social tab box… doesn’t work. No one can get it to work no matter what we try. Frustrating/

      • shehzan says

        Hello, can you provide your website’s url. I might be able to help you once i see the site. I had tried many a things and finally this method of deleting facebook’s cache with teh debuger tool and then implementing the yoast thing worked well for me. I hope to help you. and dont get frustrated. there is always a way. thanks and good luck :)

  24. shehzan says

    hello guys,

    I encountered the same issue with the images on my site. however, i tried many a things and finally found the solution. i hope this works for you as it did for me.

    I have found the facebook’s cache keeps a copy of the tags and data it uses from your posts. if you are able to see a thumbnail of any of the images from your posts on facebook the way you want, you can try discarding your facebook cache for the url in question.

    One of my post was successfully posted on FB when i shared it, however, others had this issue and i did not get the best images to share on social media. sometimes the image was missing or the meta data was blank.

    i think it is mostly FB cache issue. you cantry installing the yoast seo plugin or some other pluggin which provides functionality of OGP tags. when this is done, simply test and try to share the post. if the thumbnails are missing, try to flush the FB cache utilizing this link – developers.facebook.com/tools/debug.

    once this is done, try hsaring once more. I am sure you would be successful. it took me around 4 hours to get to this point to get the job done.

    The key here is that at least one of the post’s image should work as expected. and set the image as featured. rest is all trial and error that will hopefully solve the problem.

    thanks. : )

  25. Nisa Alfarizi says

    Good morning, my name is Nisa. I am from Indonesia. After reading above tutorial I still do not understand why I did not post pictures appear when sharing on facebook. This is one example of my articles.
    Pictures show:
    Pictures and links do not appear:
    Open graph:

    Is there a problem with my wordpress plugin, I use Yoast SEO plugin and Jetpack. Thank you for your help.

  26. Marge Burkell says

    I use your site ALL the time to help understand and make my WP site better! So thanks for that!

    That said this is not working for me either! I think the problem is that my posts are very image heavy and WP is setting a lot of OG:Image tags in the post header?

    So I used Yoast SEO on my latest post to set the FB and Twitter images as suggested but it’s still picking up the incorrect pics from the post. Doing some research it seems others are saying that when there are a lot of OG:Images designated that this isn’t working. Grrrr.

    So I used the FB debug tool and it shows at the bottom of the page that it is going to show the CORRECT image BUT it’s still not doing that! Grrr…

    …so any ideas? I am finding that anywhere OGP is scraping for content this is happening, like in my Content Cards plugin! I can use that tool for including other sites into curated posts BUT it’s not working for my OWN posts because it is selecting the last (my signature) image instead of the first, title image of any post! I do NOT use featured images simply because I display text before my large image just before my more tag and that’s not an option with featured image. It’s also not an option in my theme to turn the featured image off. I have never found a way that I can use a featured image without it screwing up how my posts look listed on a page with a double image so I simply don’t use them. If you know of a workaround I would love to hear it!

    Thanks for all your help!
    Your website is the bomb!
    ~Marge Burkell

  27. Alexander Ang says

    Hi thanks for the sharing… When I tried on the debug tool that you shared with us in the article,

    It came out with this message:
    The ‘og:type’ property is required, but not present.

    What does that mean? Does anyone have this issue?

    Thank you for your sharing once again. Appreciate that!

    Regards,
    Alexander Ang

  28. Gary Lister says

    Used FB Debugger. FB absolutely refuses to recognize the og:image from the meta information. I’ve been troubleshooting this for about 6 hours. I’ve tried editing code in the function.php and header.php with no luck, I’ve tried various plugins as well. Nothing works. When I use the FB Debugger, I get no errors, it sees all of the meta properties correctly, and builds the post with all of the parts EXCEPT the thumbnail image. Don’t know what else to do.

  29. N_Thirty says

    I am using the plug in but all of a sunday today it wasnt sharing the posts the same way. i have put in the images and write up that i want but for some reason it just shares its own thing. is there a reason for this.

  30. Kaileen says

    Hey guys, I must be doing something wrong. I’ve read through the entire thread and tried everything. The thumbnail image used to work but I’ve updated my site and now nothing. Please help!

    Thanks!!!

  31. Candy says

    Since I found your blog I have been able to fix all my issues when working on WordPress. Im a self-taught so sometimes I got stucked on details and you have been my best help ever! Thanks so much for sharing the knowledge!

  32. Cliff Rohde says

    This function kind of blew up for me when I switched from All-in-one-SEO to Yoast. I also use Super WP Cache and Cloudflare, but even after clearing all caches, I can get Facebook to recognize set as OG:image, but not display it. Very frustrating.

  33. Chicon says

    Resizing the featured image is to be the biggest image on the page combined with the Facebook debugger did the trick

  34. Karin says

    I’m having the same problem as Riki. I added to my head which worked for the home page but it took over all my posts too… so when I posted an article i brought in that main picture from my homepage as well. No good. Any suggestions?

  35. Katie Limberg says

    Hello,

    I am struggling and can’t seem to find what’s wrong. I use the Facebook debugger and this is what I get.
    Error: parsing input URL, no data cached, or no data was scraped

    I am new to most of this and don’t understand html very well.

    I just want to be able to share my website links on Facebook. If someone could give me some insight that would be great.

  36. riki says

    Do you have any tips if its not pulling up the correct image for your website itself. I would expect FB to use my home page image but it only uses part of my homepage image. How can I fix this?

  37. WPBeginner Staff says

    These instructions are for the free version. Seems like you have not set up WordPress SEO correctly. To enable the social tab, log in to admin area and then in the admin menu bar click on SEO -> Social. Make sure to check the box next to Add Open Graph meta data.

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