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Thumbnails not showing for shared links on Facebook

Written by: | Published: September 30, 2011 | Updated: April 27, 2015

I recently started noticing that when I shared a link from one of my WordPress sites, sometimes the associated thumbnails would not show with the shared link. This started happening right about the same time as all the recent major FB changes so I decided to ignore the issue. However, today, at least a week later, I was still having the problem, but not with links from every site. Another facet to the problem, auto publishing of links to Facebook from any of the sites is working fine. So is it a Facebook issue or a WordPress issue?

Link shared on Facebook, thumbnails not showing
Link shared on Facebook, thumbnails not showing

 

Link shared on Facebook, thumbnails showing correctly
Link shared on Facebook, thumbnails showing correctly

So I started digging for solutions and this is what I found…

The issue isn’t entirely resolved, but I did discover a few things to make the problem less of a pain.

  1. First, I deactivated Share and Follow, a social sharing plugin I had installed on only two of my sites. I just installed the plugin, and I was only having missing thumbnail issues on those two sites, so that sounded like a logical solution. The problem was only partially fixed. It’s odd to me that a plugin would interfer, but it’s the only recent thing I’ve changed at my end… so worth a shot.
  2. If I post a link with a trailing backslash, the images don’t show up (only sometimes). If I remove the trailing backslash, then thumbnails do appear correctly (but only after #1 was dealt with).

I’m not having this issue on all my sites. I haven’t figured out what is wonky between self hosted WordPress installs and Facebook, but at least now I can share links with thumbnails (most of the time) again.

Another interesting discovery…

Domains on Facebook profile won't edit correctly
Domains on Facebook profile won't edit correctly

I was digging through my Facebook profile trying to figure out if something there might have something to do with this problem. I noticed that the one site that isn’t giving me any problems, JGoode.com, is not listed on my Facebook profile. Hmmmm, maybe that’s related. So I figured I’d delete a few other domains that aren’t showing thumbnails correctly and see how that connect. I tried 5 times and couldn’t edit the websites listed. So maybe that’s where some of the issue is too. I won’t know until I can successfully edit the websites on my profile info though.

Have you had any similar issues or do you know a fix? I’d love to hear about it!

By the way, yes, this site, 100directions.com is one of the sites having issues…. bummer eah?

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Jen is Passionate about Creativity. She is the owner and "doodle in charge" of JGoode Designs, a Denver based design studio. She is an illustrator, mixed media artist and creative lifestyle blogger. Jen has been a creative professional since 1998 but says she's been an artist since she was old enough to eat glue.

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7 thoughts on “Thumbnails not showing for shared links on Facebook”

  1. I am having the same problem. Not all websites, but on certain posts on this linked site in particular. I will try all the suggestions above. Thanks

    Reply
  2. BRILLIANT IDEA! I’ll just do that! Put up the image and include the link… DUH, why didn’t I think of that??

    BTW, I’m having the same problem, which is why I’m here. lol

    Reply
    • Thanks for the feedback! I did read your post before I started digging into the issue more. I do have the image on this site but not the other site with the same problem. I haven’t always had this issue, it’s only been the last week or 2 so something somewhere has changed. The part that bugs me the most is that there is no image choice when this image shows up – usually you get a choice of all the images available in the post, but with this issue, no other images show up. Additionally, the problem isn’t when someone clicks like from my site, its when I paste the url directly into Facebook’s status update via a browser.

      PS the above “fix” suggestions are what I did to make it somewhat work again. Thanks for trying it out!

      Reply

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