Hi,
I’m having issues with the featured images. It’s a recent problem I’m experiencing when I’m sharing an article on Facebook or when I send Newsletters. It won’t find my featured image, even though it displays it on my website.
Here is the website : http://www.riders.nc
for example : if you try sharing this article http://www.riders.nc/surf-en-nouvelle-caledonie-2/ on Facebook it won’t show any photo. If I want to get a thumbnail I have to change the featured image title, then fetch new scrape infos in Facebook debugger 4-5 times. This is very weird and annoying. I won’t even get the featured image sometimes and it will just give me 3 photos to choose from.
Is there a fix? I’m losing credibility when I’m trying to share an article and I don’t have a photo to advertise it…
Nothing to do with theme. It’s an issue with Facebook. You can use the FB debug tool to check your META data. The OG tags are there expressly for Facebook.
FB had an outage just a little while ago, btw.
Facebook has intermittent issues where some days they won’t grab image; some days they grab image, and an hour later you have an empty box, some days they don’t grab image right away, and then it pops in 10 minutes later. Nature of the beast. I deal with this on a dozen of our sites every day, and a royal pain.
Upshot – learn to work around it, or try again later when sharing. Post direct link vs using share button, or paste in the headline and URL, the nit might grab stuff. It’s really inconsistent long term.
But, check your meta data in your page source to make sure you have all the correct OG tags in place; then run the Facebook debug tool on your post page to see if anything major. If not, then it’s just their twisted universe spinning out of control.
Thanks Christopher, I found a Facebook thread about the issue https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/562512327227740/
Apparently Facebook is still working on the problem, for long term fix. Hopping they will find a solution quickly, as I can work around it, but some of my clients are not that comprehensive.
One of their bugs recently refused to grab anything; so I ended up manually pasting in headline, first paragraph, then uploading the photo, then pasting in the URL …. that was a terrible week!
At this point, I’m no longer surprised with whether it works or not. 🙂
