Link Preview Wrong on Facebook or Social Media
When you share your site on Facebook, LinkedIn, or in a text message, the preview shows the wrong image, an old title, or nothing at all.
Common signs of this issue
- Sharing your link shows an old logo, a random page image, or a grey empty box instead of the picture you'd expect.
- The preview title or description is outdated — sometimes from a version of the site that's years old.
- It looks right on one platform (say, Facebook) but wrong on another (LinkedIn, X, iMessage).
- You updated the site recently, but shares still show the pre-update look.
- Previews work for the homepage but not for individual pages, or vice versa.
Safe checks you can do yourself
None of these require sharing passwords with anyone.
- Understand what drives previews: platforms read special Open Graph tags in your page's code (og:title, og:description, og:image) — not what the page visually looks like.
- Test what platforms actually see: search for "opengraph checker" or use Facebook's free Sharing Debugger and paste your link. It shows the exact title, description, and image being read.
- In Facebook's Sharing Debugger, click "Scrape Again" — this forces Facebook to throw away its cached preview and fetch the current one. LinkedIn has the same thing ("Post Inspector").
- View your page source (right-click → View Page Source) and search for
og:image. If there's no og:image tag at all, platforms are guessing — and their guesses are the random images you're seeing. - Check the image the tag points to actually loads when pasted in a browser, and that it's a reasonable size — around 1200×630 pixels is the standard; very small images get ignored.
- On WordPress, an SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO) manages these tags — open the page in the editor and look for the plugin's "Social" tab, where the preview image and text can be set per page.
What this usually means
Two separate things cause almost every wrong preview: missing or wrong Open Graph tags on your site, or the platform's cached copy of an old preview. The checkers above tell you which one you're dealing with — if the debugger shows the right content but shares still look wrong, it's cache; if the debugger shows the wrong content, it's the tags.
Platform caches are stubborn by design: Facebook, LinkedIn and others store the first preview they generate for a URL and can keep it for weeks. Site owners routinely fix their tags perfectly and then conclude it 'didn't work' because they never forced a re-scrape.
If no og:image is set anywhere, each platform improvises — picking a random image from the page, your logo, or nothing. Setting a proper default social image site-wide (plus custom ones on key pages) fixes the randomness for good and makes every share look intentional.
What not to do
- Don't keep re-sharing the link hoping the preview refreshes — shares reuse the cached preview; only the platform's debugger/re-scrape tool refreshes it.
- Don't stuff the preview title with keywords — this is what humans see in their feed; write it for them.
- Don't use a tiny logo file as the og:image; platforms reject small images and fall back to guessing again.
- Don't install a second SEO plugin just to control social tags — two SEO plugins output duplicate conflicting tags, which makes previews worse.
When to get help
Setting correct Open Graph tags site-wide — sensible defaults, correct image sizes, per-page overrides on your money pages — is an hour or two of well-defined work for someone who's done it before. If you share links as part of marketing (or customers share them for you), broken previews quietly cost clicks on every single share, so this small job tends to pay for itself.
Not sure what to do next?
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Frequently asked questions
Why does Facebook show an old image when I share my site?
Facebook cached the preview the first time anyone shared that URL and keeps reusing it. Paste your link into Facebook's Sharing Debugger and click 'Scrape Again' to force a fresh preview.
What size should my link preview image be?
1200×630 pixels is the safe standard — large enough for every major platform, with the roughly 1.91:1 shape they crop to. Keep important content near the center.
Why is the preview different on Facebook vs LinkedIn vs iMessage?
Each platform keeps its own cached copy and refreshes on its own schedule, so after a site update they disagree until each one re-scrapes. The underlying tags are the same; the caches aren't.
Do link previews affect SEO?
Not directly — Google doesn't rank you on Open Graph tags. Indirectly, yes: better previews get more clicks and shares, and that traffic and visibility feed everything else.
I don't control the code. Can I still fix previews?
On WordPress, yes — SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math give you a per-page 'Social' tab, no coding needed. On website builders (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify), look for 'social image' or 'social sharing' in each page's settings.