Facebook: What Is Wrong With Post Previews?

Facebook: Fixing Broken Post Previews

Over the last month of more, I've been finding that when I post article links to my website's Facebook page, Facebook is no longer showing thumbnail previews of the image that is associated with the post.

Now when you paste your link into an update window, the space flickers but shows a blank spot. You have to trust the blank white square that what you want for an image is coming over.

No longer do you have an option to pick an image. No longer do you have a test visual of what's coming. It's just blind faith.

And from what I can tell, this problem has been quietly growing amongst users over the last year or so, now finally hitting my own pages.

After looking around, I've seen multiple suggestions for fixes.

One was adding {   } somewhere on your post's page, but I did not have any success with that.


{ .wpbeginner. }

Others suggested going to a developer's page on Facebook, enter your url, then you should be able to see your preview images.

{ https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ }

I didn't think it was working for me, but what I did was enter my url, hit the "Debug" button, then hit "Fetch new scrape information," and that seemed to do the trick for me.

You can scroll down the page and see a preview of what your preview would look like. If you don't see your preview the first time, you do get to see it the second time around. Or at least for me, I did.

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It seems pretty stupid that this glitch is allowed to linger for this long on Facebook. Especially considering it impacts folks that run fan pages and that is something that helps the site exist.

Meh... for now, this is what you need to do.

-Write your post,

-Publish it.

-Go to your 'bookmarked' link to the debug page.

-Enter your url, hit 'debug.'

-Then hit the new scrape button.

And then you can go back to your page, enter your url and post from there.

What a f*ing PIA.

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Resources:

wordpress.org/featured-images-not-displaying

wordpress.org: facebook-thumbnails-not-showing

robblatt.com: facebook-previews-not-working


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