How to Fix Facebook Incorrect Thumbnail Issue in WordPress

Sometimes while sharing your articles on Facebook, you might have noticed incorrect post thumbnail showing up. This happens with many WordPress users.

You’ll learn to fix Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue in WordPress, in this article.

Why doesn’t Facebook pick up correct thumbnail?

There can be many reasons so as to why Facebook isn’t correctly guessing the right thumbnail image. Having multiple images set in the tag og:image where your featured image is smaller than rest of the images, is one of the most common reason.

Open Graph (og) tags are used by Facebook. WordPress plugins like SEO by Yoast automatically adds og tags to images so as to prevent missing thumbnail issue.

Missing open graph meta tag for the thumbnail image, CDN issues, caching plugins, etc. are some of the common causes. It is hard to guess the exact reason of the issue as there are no specific error messages displayed when using the debugging tool.

Let’s see how to fix the Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue in WordPress.

Manually upload thumbnail image

If you’re facing the upload thumbnail image issue, try uploading the image manually.

There is a drawback to this method though. The image that you upload for the thumbnail is stored in the photos section. If you want, you can delete the image later, Facebook will continue to show the message as a thumbnail for the article in your timeline.

The problem with this fix is that if other users share your article, then it may still show the incorrect thumbnail.

The next solution will take care of this part.

Tell Facebook Precisely To Use Thumbnail of Your Choice

If you use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, then you can set a specific thumbnail image for Facebook. To do so, scroll down to Yoast SEO meta box below the post editor and then click on the social tab. There you can see a button to upload a thumbnail image for Facebook.

You can simply add your Facebook Thumbnail image there, and this will fix the issue in most cases.

If the problem persists, you’ll have to reset the Facebook cache.

Using Facebook Debug Tool to reset Facebook cache

The Facebook debug tool is the easiest way to troubleshoot issues with Facebook open graph implementation on your WordPress site.

Copy your WordPress post URL and paste in the debugger tool and click on ‘Debug’. This is the most common error you’ll see,

Provided og:image is not big enough. Please use an image that’s at least 200×200 px. Image ‘http://yourdomain.com/uploads/2017/02/some-image-from-article.jpg’; will be used instead.

What happens is, Facebook uses their best guess method to choose a thumbnail image. If there’s larger image available, Facebook will use that image instead. Press the debug button again and the error shall disappear.

We hope that above methods might have fixed your Facebook incorrect thumbnail issue in WordPress. If you know any other solution, please share with us in the comment section.