The other day I ran across an issue where a WordPress site’s posts weren’t displaying correctly on Facebook when I pasted in the URL. Usually when I paste a link in the status update bar of Facebook it will automatically pull in the post’s title, short excerpt, and a thumbnail. For some reason this particular post wasn’t pulling any information from the website into Facebook.
After some research, I found that Facebook has a Debugger Tool that can help troubleshoot issues with Open Graph tags. Facebook uses the Open Graph protocol to know what information from your site to embed in your Facebook timeline when you post a link.
After pasting in the link to the troublesome post, the debugger displayed a couple of Open Graph warnings that needed to be fixed. The issue was related to a thumbnail image that was too small. After I increased the size of the image in the post the URL worked in the Facebook status bar.
Any time you are having issues with your WordPress posts displaying correctly in Facebook, paste the URL into the debugger tool and you’ll know exactly what the problem is and how to fix it.
