Change photo when sharing link

  • Unknown's avatar
    northernshelly · Member ·

    How do I change the photo that displays when I share my website link? I have changed my featured image to the one I want it to be, but it is still showing the picture of me that is displayed on the page (wouldn’t be so bad if it was at least the full picture, but the way it only shows my torso isn’t the image I want to portray 😳). I have WordPress premium. https://landlockedtravel.ca/

    Thanks in advance!

    Shelly

    WP.com: Yes
    Jetpack: No
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • aleone89 · Staff ·

    Hey there!

    Happy to help you with this.

    You may wish to upload a header image to the site via Appearance > Customize > Header image.

    It could be the case the social media would pick this up before the image on the front page (the site as a whole), before the image in the content.

    Which platform are you sharing this website on? The reason being is that it could be the case that we can ask these social media platforms to re-scrape the site data once that image has been uploaded.

    I hope this helps!

  • Unknown's avatar
    northernshelly · Member ·

    Hi @aleone89, thanks for your reply.

    I don’t want to upload a header image because I have my logo there at the top of the page.

    I figured out that when sharing the link on Facebook, it uses the correct image (my logo).
    But when I share the link in a private message in Messenger, it shows the partial picture of me, which is the second picture on the home page.

    Any idea how to change that ?

    Thanks,
    Shelly

  • staff-95percentghost · Staff ·

    Hi Shelly, it could be worth adding your logo as the featured image of your front page – that featured image function generally also sets the image that should be picked up by social media/messaging apps when sharing your site link too.

    It looks like your theme, Dara, is currently set to have featured images appear on pages, so it might be worth first adding the featured image to your home page, and then heading to Appearance > Customize > Content Option and make sure that your pages would not show featured images. That way your logo won’t be visibly duplicated.

    We do also have a guide for the content options here:
    https://en.support.wordpress.com/customizer/content-options/

    After you’ve done this it might take a while to see any change when you’re sharing the link on Messenger. As a general rule we’d suggest giving it a few hours to update; but you could also test Meta’s Share Debugger to see if that can help re-scrape your site to update what Messenger sees:
    https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

  • Unknown's avatar
    northernshelly · Member ·

    Thanks @staff-95percentghost, but that didn’t work either. I set my featured image on my home page to my logo, and then of course it was showing near the top of my page, under the menu.
    Then I went to Appearance > Customize > Content Options, and unchecked the box that says Display on Pages under Featured Images. The image was still showing no matter how many times I refreshed.
    Then I opened the page in another browser, and the featured image was no longer showing, BUT now none of the images in my Latest Posts block were showing anymore either. Frustrating.

    Shelly

  • aleone89 · Staff ·

    Hello Shelly,

    I totally sympathise, these things can be frustrating.

    When you set a featured image, this is the image that should be picked up as the OG image by social media (OG – OpenGraph).

    To demonstrate, I’ve uploaded the featured image to the homepage, and source clear demonstrates this to be the image:

    However, Facebook is not picking up that update:

    If the desired image is set on the site, that’s as much as we can do from a website perspective. Facebook would need to rescrape the site and update that accordingly, and we’re at their behest on that update outside of asking them to rescrape that here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

    I set my featured image on my home page to my logo, and then of course it was showing near the top of my page, under the menu….Then I opened the page in another browser, and the featured image was no longer showing, BUT now none of the images in my Latest Posts block were showing anymore either. Frustrating.

    So that we can keep the featured image uploaded and in the source code above, and also keep featured images showing in the Latest Posts block – but hide the logo from the top of the page, I’ve gone ahead and added the following CSS via Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS. 

    /* Hide featured image AL */ 

.entry-thumbnail {
    display: none;
}

    I’d recommend asking Facebook to rescrape the page until they get it right.

    I hope this helps!

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