How To Fix The Facebook Incorrect Thumbnail Issue In WordPress?

WordPress is a great platform and WordPress sites are best for blogs and other business purposes. Being easy to use for both technical and non-technical people, the popularity of WP and WP-based websites has increased tremendously. WordPress also lets you share your posts on different social media platforms such as Facebook for the engagement of more users as well as getting more traffic. However, no technology is foolproof and some or the other error or issue surfaces which needs to get fixed. Among these errors, a common error is showing up the wrong thumbnail when you share the post on Facebook. In this blog, we will learn about Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue.

What Is The Facebook Incorrect Thumbnail Issue?

Suppose you are a blogger who has just shared an article on Facebook and from that, you are hoping for some good engagement from the audience on that particular post of yours. But suddenly, you notice that it is showing some other thumbnail and not the one that you have selected. Is this a major crisis? Definitely not. There are many WP users who complain about the same error. The best thing is, you can easily fix it.

Before we go to the fixing methods, let us discuss the reasons that lead to such an error.

Why Facebook Picks Up The Incorrect Thumbnail?

There are numerous reasons for this. What Facebook does is it usually makes a guess for the image that you wish to use as a thumbnail for your post. For this, it utilizes the Open Graph or og tags. One reason is most common behind wrong thumbnail images and that is having multiple images in the og:image tag. If the other images present are bigger than the one you have used as a featured image, then Facebook will choose one of them instead.

Plugins such as Yoast for WP add og tags to your website automatically so that you don’t encounter a missing thumbnail problem. However, this can sometimes lead to wrong or incorrect thumbnail issues when there are multiple images present.

Some other reasons for this issue are:

• Issues related to your content delivery network
• Caching plugins
• Missing og meta tags

What Are The Different Ways To Fix Facebook Incorrect Thumbnail Issue?

There are three different ways in which you will be able to fix this issue.

1. Uploading the image manually

2. Correcting using Yoast plugin

3. Correcting Using Facebook debugging

Let us discuss them one by one in detail.

1. Uploading The Image Manually

Let us suppose you want to share your post on the Facebook page. While uploading it, you see that Facebook has not detected the correct image. In such a case, you can upload the image of your choice just by clicking on the upload link. This image is also stored by Facebook in your photos section. However, you are always free to delete it. It doesn’t matter whether the image is saved or not, Facebook will still show the correct image on your post.

But there is a small issue with this solution. This fix method will work only for you and not for others. This means that it will not work for other people who want to share your post on Facebook because it may still show the incorrect thumbnail in the post they have shared. That is why it is the simplest method but not a completely reliable one.

The next fix method takes care of this problem as well.

2. Correcting Using Yoast Plugin

You can correct the Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue on your post easily if you have a Yoast plugin installed on your WP. You can easily set up a specific image as a thumbnail for your post. To do this, while writing the post, click on the Yoast SEO meta box given below the Post Editor button. Click the Social tab and then you will see the options for sharing posts on social media. The opened window will have many options including:

• Facebook title using which you will be able to use another title instead of the one you previously or originally had.
• Facebook image that helps you to override the image on Facebook just by uploading an image or by pasting the image’s URL. The image you choose needs to be 1200 x 630 pixels ideally.
• Facebook description that enables you to use another meta description in place of the original one.

In most cases, you will be able to correct this wrong thumbnail issue with this method. However, if Facebook still continues to show the incorrect image, you can try the next.

3. Correcting Using Facebook Debugging

For troubleshooting the issues related to Facebook on your WP site, the Facebook debugging tool is very handy. To fix this Facebook incorrect thumbnail error, you need to copy the URL of your Facebook post and next, paste it in the field of debugging tool and press Enter. Mostly, the error is:

“Provided og:image is not big enough. Please use image which is at least 200 X 200 pixels. Image “random image in article URL” will be used instead”.

We already know that Facebook ‘guesses’ the image that it has to pick up from your post or article so that it can use it as a featured thumbnail. Facebook wrongly guesses one of the images to be the right image if there are many larger images included. To fix this error, you just have to press the debug button again on the same URL.

Wrapping Up:

I hope this post was useful for fixing the Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue on the WP site. The next time you face such an error, just follow the above discussed instructions. You will find it helpful for making sure that you have the correct thumbnail and apart from this, you can also tweak and change the titles and meta descriptions according to your needs. These are really quick fixes for such Facebook thumbnail-related issues.

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