Facebook is a great platform for online sharing. This social networking platform has a large number of active users on a daily basis. In this case, once you have integrate Facebook with WordPress, your shared links can get more chances to be clicked and checked by more potential website users. However, no matter you choose to post to Facebook manually or automate the sharing process, you may find an error. The Facebook posts come with the wrong featured images that are not the ones you decide for your articles. Frankly speaking, this is not a perfect sharing, so you need to resolve this issue. Here, you can make use of a special tool – Facebook Debugger. In the following, we’d like to tell you how to fix WordPress post sharing error in Facebook using Facebook Debugger.
What Cause the Sharing Issue and the Common Resolution
In fact, there are several situations that may lead to this problem. We have listed some common causes in the following.
- When sharing your WordPress articles, Facebook will guess which images in your content are the featured images. This is done by using the Open Graph tags. In this case, if this tag is used improperly or is missing, the showcase issue may happen.
- Facebook usually prefers the large image to be the thumbnail one instead of your real thumbnail picture. This platform can recognize images with at least 200×200 pixels. However, the large images with at least 600×315 pixels are the preferred ones of Facebook. In this case, if you use the size for your featured images that Facebook does not like, the sharing post cannot appear properly.
- If you use the WordPress cache plugins or the CDN service for the better page loading speed, this issue also may occur for these tools may pick up the wrong featured images.
In the most cases, you choose to resolve this issue manually. Here, you just need to click the wrong image to open the image lightbox. And then, you can pick up the right one for display. However, this is just a partial troubleshooting. After all, if some others want to share your content on their own Facebook accounts, this issue still occurs without the realization.
How Facebook Debugger Works for You
Frankly speaking, the Facebook Debugger is a little known but truly useful tool. With it, you can see the information when your website content is shared on Facebook. In this case, you can easily know whether the featured images are missing or chosen with the wrong options. Also, you can check whether the description snippet is right so as to reflect your articles accurately.
To use this tool, you only need to enter the Facebook Debugger page and paste your post link into the blank field. After clicking the Debug button, this tool will work out to figure out your meta tags and display errors on the Facebook platform. Even, it can test the HTML of your content.
Once you have fixed the available errors, you also need to click the Scrape Again button so as to clear the cache. This way, Facebook will show your posts with the proper featured images and description.
In the following, we have listed the common errors that are detected by Facebook Debugger.
There Is No Featured Image At All
It is possible that your blog post does not have the featured image at all. In this case, Facebook will grab the largest image within your web content as the featured image.
The Featured Image Is Of the Small Size
If you use the small featured image that Facebook does not recognize at all, you can get the following error notification. Note that the minimum size should be 200×200 pixels.
When this happens, Facebook will give you the ability to choose the available images from your articles that act as the featured image.
Make Use of the Facebook Open Graph Plugin
In fact, the improper display of the featured image on Facebook is just one of the potential issues. The main error occurs with the og tags. If these tags are missing or improper, your post title, link, description and image can come with the wrong showcase.
To fix the og tags issue, we highly recommend the Facebook Open Graph plugin. This special tool can insert the Facebook open graph tags into your WordPress website so as to achieve the effective Facebook sharing. Also, you can add the Twitter card tags for Twitter sharing and Schema.org tags for Google Plus sharing.
Upon the installation of this plugin, you should make some configurations of it from the plugin settings page. Here, you can decide the maximum characters of the description length when sharing the blog posts. If you want, you can also decide the default description with the homepage description or the custom text. And also, you can upload the default and fixed featured image. Personally, we do not recommend you to do so.
Next, you can move to the Open Graph tab. Here, you can enable all the open graph tags based on your needs, including the title, site name, URL, description, featured image, author, date, publisher, Facebook page, location and many more. With these tags available, you can share your posts on Facebook with the most efficient display. No error occurs.
