When you share a link on Facebook, Facebook will automatically pull in an image and summary for your post. Most of the time this just works — but if your preview looks wrong or missing, here's everything you need to know.
How Facebook picks your preview image
When you share a link on Facebook, Facebook scans the page and looks for the best available image. Here's the order it checks:
Open Graph & tags — The gold standard. If your page has
og:imagetags, Facebook will use those first — they're designed exactly for this.Images inside article content — If no OG tags are found, Facebook looks inside
<article>tags or the main body of the page.Any other images on the page — Last resort. Facebook scans the rest of the page and pick the best candidates we can find.
For any image to qualify, it needs to be at least 200×200px and include a width or height attribute in the HTML. Tiny icons and decorative images are automatically skipped.
Why your preview might look wrong
A few things can get in the way:
The page is blocking the Facebook scanner Some sites block automated access via their firewall or robots.txt. If you own the site, you'll need to whitelist Facebook's scraper to fix this.
SSL certificate issue Seeing a certificate error? The site's SSL chain is likely incomplete. This is a server-side fix — the site owner needs to update their SSL certificate to resolve it.
It's not your page to control Sharing a link to someone else's site? Unfortunately there's no way to change which image gets pulled — that's determined entirely by how the other site is set up.
How to check and fix your link
The fastest way to diagnose a preview problem is to run your URL through the Facebook Sharing Debugger. It shows exactly what metadata is available, which image is being selected, and lets you force a refresh of any cached version.
Once you've made changes to your page, use the debugger to clear the cache — otherwise you may keep seeing the old preview.
Quick wins for your website
Want consistently great previews every time you or someone else shares your site? These three things make the biggest difference:
Add Open Graph tags At minimum: og:title, og:description, and og:image. Put them near the top of your <head> so they're found immediately. Learn more at ogp.me.
Use a proper preview image At least 200×200px, with width or height declared in the HTML. Larger is better — most platforms display previews at 1200×630px.
Don't block Facebook's scanner Check that your firewall and robots.txt aren't blocking Facebook. If they are, add an explicit exception to allow the Facebook bot.
Still not working? Reach out to our support team — we're happy to help troubleshoot.