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Facebook WordPress image correction

Are your businesses’ Facebook posts showing a scroll of multiple, often redundant, images or worse yet, a blank silhouette when linking to your WordPress site? If so, this article will teach you how to correct it, and how to prevent it from happening again. Best of all, for most WordPress users, the fix is straightforward.

The advice on this page applies to all WordPress site owners using Facebook. Most of our clients and contacts are involved in some sort of regulated e-commerce as we specialize is tough accounts and expert advice. If you are a high-risk merchant, you might already know, marketing your business can be difficult for high-risk website owners. Most options for getting your company out there are limited for many websites, which is why you need to find alternatives. SEO for high-risk businesses is one way to increase your visibility while promoting your high-risk products or services; using social media, like Facebook, is another. But, even if you have a simple info WordPress blog and post on FaceBook, the steps below will fix the dreaded Facebook “egg silhouette” photo once and for all.

Many site owners face problems when pushing Facebook updates out through WordPress, especially when it comes to the images. This is a problem we’ve tackled and solved, and we wish to share some of our expertise on the subject with you below. Have any questions as to how to accept credit cards or make your high-risk products stand out online? Get in touch with the contact us at the bottom of this page.

Get the correct feature image from a post to show on Facebook

Have you ever posted a link to your website content on Facebook and had the wrong image show up? This happens when you don’t select an image to feature on your website page, especially if you’re using WordPress. This problem compounds itself when Facebook then caches a blank or generic image for your webpage. What this means is that when you go back to change your webpage to include the featured image you want, Facebook will still only show the generic image it cached before you fixed the error. We figured out a relatively easy way to force Facebook to clear that cached image so it will see the new picture you have posted. We also figured out how to entirely avoid this issue for WordPress users of both Yoast and All In One SEO by selecting an image for your “Open Graph” metadata, and have included super easy instructions below.

Preview your business post’s image and URL snippet, then debug directly within Facebook

You can visit the Facebook debugger page directly to preview how any images or URL snippets will show. You can also debug a post to refresh the image and URL snippet if you made changes to your website after posting to Facebook. Refreshing, in this context is the same as clearing your Facebook cache on one specific post.

Visit the Facebook debugger page directly at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Select a Facebook image with All In One SEO

If you use All In One SEO, you can set a default Facebook image to be included when you don’t set a specific image for your webpage. This will make sure you never see that plain ‘circle person’ image or any other generic image that turns customers and visitors away. The simple steps you can follow are:

  1. Click on All In One SEO on your WP dashboard to enable the free Social Media feature.
  2. Select the feature manager.
  3. Activate the Social Media function.
  4. Choose your default image (referred to as the “OG Image.”)
  5. Manually set the size of your image’s height and width (optional)

While step number five is optional, we strongly recommend it. By setting a specific height and width, you avoid having Facebook incorrectly processing the image. Additionally, this will save on loading time. Read more about Facebook image sizes and best practices here. 

Set Facebook image with Yoast SEO

Yoast is another excellent option for DIY SEO. Yoast also makes it relatively easy to set your default Facebook image. You’ll need to follow different steps depending on whether you set your homepage to “static” or “latest post.” We recommend that you check what your site is set up for, and follow the steps we outline below accordingly.

“Latest Post” homepage steps:

  1. Facebook WordPress image correction - Yoast SEO Social Media imageClick the Yoast SEO option on your dashboard (pictured above)
  2. Select “Social”
  3. Select the “Facebook” tab
  4. Under “Frontpage settings” select the image you want and fill in the title and description fields.
  5. Save your changes and exit the settings menu.

“Static” homepage steps:

  1. Click on the “Social” tab on your WordPress dashboard (pictured above)
  2. Select the f tab and select your image, title, and description.

Preview Facebook posts with Yoast:

If you have Yoast Premium, you’ll also have the option to preview what your Facebook post will look like. This comes in handy for fixing any issues before they arise.

You can find more details on Yoast SEO & Social Media and instructions for Open Graph settings.

Clearing the Facebook image cache

Before we start, there are a few things you should keep in mind. The steps below will only work for posts that are already on Facebook. The outlines above, on the other hand, are steps to ensure that future posts will show correctly. Additionally, you must complete the cache on your site before you use the Facebook debugger. This includes cloud proxies like Sucuri.net and plugins like WordFence.com.

None of the steps we outlined above will matter if you don’t go in and clear the image cache Facebook already has for your website. To do this, you must use the Facebook developer tool to debug your page. This might sound intimidating but, if you follow these steps, debugging your page will be nice and smooth. (If you use All IN One SEO, you can follow the simple settings we discussed above, if not, follow the simple steps below.)

  1. Follow this link to the Debugger, and enter your website URL.
  2. Once the debugger has loaded all of your page’s info, you might have an error warning at the top of the page; this will tell you if your site has any errors when interacting with Facebook in general and should be noted and fixed.
  3. Hit the “scrape again” button to see how your posts show up after Facebook has debugged your page.

It’s that simple!

If you have questions on how to improve your high-risk business’ reach, feel free to get in touch with us. While we specialize in helping high-risk business with payment gateways and merchant account recommendations, we are more than happy to help on issues like these!