One of the most annoying things that Facebook page owners have to deal with is trying to share a post on the Facebook page and it not displaying correctly. But I am here to help you with an easy guide on how to fix that.
The problem that you might be dealing with is that once you paste the link you want to share, Facebook won’t load the article. In most cases, it won’t load the featured image, but on some more extreme occasions, it won’t load any of the article at all.
In other words, when you try to share your new article on your Facebook page, all you get is an ugly post, formatted like nothing anyone would click on. Usually, it’s no image with just www.yourwebsite.com listed there and no description. That’s horrible.
And even if it loads the meta description, an article on Facebook without an image accompanying it is just as useless.
So how to fix that? How to fix Facebook’s image not loading when posting your URL? Or, if you are a bit more unlucky, how to fix the even worse problem when Facebook doesn’t even load the title or description of your post? It’s fortunately easier than you think!
Yes, not really obvious for most users – like it’s not obvious how to search your Facebook photos by date, for example – but fortunately it can be done and that’s all that matters in the end!
The easy fix for Facebook not loading images or articles
To me, this is starting to be the norm. Whenever I try to share an article, Facebook won’t “see” the featured image no matter what. However, in most cases, simply refreshing the Facebook page and trying again will fix the problem, the image will load and everything will run flawlessly.
So a simple refresh is the first thing that you should try doing – if it loads the image afterwards, you’re done with your easy fix and this is what you have to do.
However, there are cases when the image won’t appear, even after refreshing and re-pasting the URL 2-3 times in a row. Since Facebook pages are not the fastest in the world to load, you can lose precious time doing this.
You have two options here:
1. If the meta information (your article’s title and description) are loaded, but there’s no image, you can manually upload the image yourself. This isn’t ideal though as other people sharing the URL directly won’t get the image too.
2. The best method is, in my opinion, to run your article(s) through the Facebook Sharing Debugger before publishing.
This is what has become the norm for me and it’s the fastest way to make sure that everything loads properly (and for all users trying to share your content, not just yourself) whenever they want to share your content on Facebook.
This will also help fix those instances when Facebook won’t load your article’s title or meta information – it’s the perfect fix for all (or at least most) of the sharing-related issues on Facebook.
And it is also extremely simple to do: Simply load the Facebook Debugging Tool (click to visit) and paste the URL that you want to share on Facebook, then hit the blue “Debug” button.
You will get some nice information there about your article and how Facebook sees it. But the good thing is that if there are any errors like images not loading, or the title/description not loading, you can quickly fix that by clicking the “Scrape again” button at the top.
Usually, you will have to hit the Scrape again button 2-3 times, but eventually everything will load just fine (you can even ignore the errors at the top, if any, as it is my case).
This will force Facebook to reload all data for the url and it will now get your Article’s title and meta description and most likely the featured image as well.
If, even after using the Facebook Debugging Tool, your link still doesn’t work properly, then it’s a problem on your side, most likely.
Either the server is down or the theme you’re using (or maybe a plugin) is causing some sort of problems. However, these rarely are the causes and in 99% of the situations you will easily fix everything with the debugging tool.
So now you know what to do when Facebook doesn’t load your article’s image or the entire meta information for your articles. I wrote this because it started to happen more and more often recently and I thought that if I am in this situation, I might not be alone. And i know how frustrating it is.
But now the Debugging Tool is my new best friend and I always run the URLs through it prior to publishing, and all is well. This also helps me with my Facebook time reduction that I am working on, which has also gone great so far.