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By default, when you share an article on Facebook or other social networks, the first image from your page will be automatically used as a preview.
If you want instead to display the Featured Image of posts as a preview, you’ll need to install a 3rd party plugin or activate a feature in the Yoast SEO plugin if you use it already.
There are 2 simple ways to fix the Facebook Thumbnail:
The OG Tags plugin and the Open Graph and Twitter Card Tags plugin are free plugins you can install to help you display the Featured Image when you share articles on Facebook or other social networks. These simple plugins will add the needed og:image property in your articles, which tells Facebook what image to use as a preview. In our case, it will use the post’s Featured Image.
If you’re using Yoast SEO already:
1. Go to the Yoast SEO > Settings menu in the Dashboard.
2. Scroll down to the Social sharing section.
3. Enable the Open Graph data feature.
If you enabled a method that we explained above to force the showing of the Featured Image on Facebook, and some articles still show a different image, then you’ll need to use the Facebook Debugger tool to fetch new information by entering the URL of a specific article:
Still doesn’t work?
Ensure you have cleared the cache if you’re using a plugin like WP Super Cache or W3C Total Cache. Also, take a look at this post on using the Facebook Debugger, from our friends at Kinsta.
