How to choose which image from a page appears in link previews?

  • Unknown's avatar
    neographilia9921 · Member ·

    When you share a website link via text or messaging apps, they usually load a preview image from the webpage. For my site, it’s making terrible selections.

    • How can I choose which image from the page is shown?
    • What determines which image appears?
    • Is there a workaround?
      For example, does it default to the oldest or newest image uploaded or added to the webpage?

    I’d prefer a solution that does not require:

    • Setting a feature image. A couple of my pages have feature images and work fine. Most would be a pain to have to add. (This could be an acceptable workaround if there’s a way to choose a feature image without it appearing at the top of the webpage, in the Twenty Fifteen theme).
    • Being price-gouged to upgrade or buy a plugin like Yeast SEO for what should be basic functionality.

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

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    When you share a website link via text or messaging apps, they usually load a preview image from the webpage. For my site, it’s making terrible selections.

    Most services will look at all images at a given link and pick the one they think is “best” to use. As you have noted this can lead to uneven results since every service is different in how they go about this. On our end you can specify an image by setting it as the “featured image” for the post or page. We discuss this in more detail here: https://wordpress.com/support/featured-images/#featured-images-in-social-media-posts

    I’d prefer a solution that does not require Setting a feature image. A couple of my pages have feature images and work fine. Most would be a pain to have to add. (This could be an acceptable workaround if there’s a way to choose a feature image without it appearing at the top of the webpage, in the Twenty Fifteen theme).

    For older themes like Twenty Fifteen there is not a setting to control which pages have a featured image or not, but it is possible by adding custom CSS code. This is an option under the Premium plan so if you were to opt to upgrade we could help with the code needed to hide the featured image

    Another option would be to switch to one of our “full site editing” themes. These newer themes are created entirely in blocks, so there is the option to edit templates directly to remove things like the featured image block. You can see a full list of themes here: https://wordpress.com/themes/filter/full-site-editing

    Being price-gouged to upgrade or buy a plugin like Yeast SEO for what should be basic functionality.

    SEO is great on WordPress.com right out of the box, so a plugin like that can be helpful for advanced optimizations, but is not needed in most cases.

    Generally the longer your blog exists, the more you post, and the more people who visit it, the higher it should climb in Google’s rankings. We go into detail on how you can optimize your site for search using our free tools here: https://wordpress.com/support/seo/

    You can also check out our free self-guided SEO course, which walks you through how to optimize your site without the use of a plugin: https://wordpress.com/learn/courses/intro-to-seo/

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