Take the fight to weird sharing images on Facebook
Being visible on social media is an important part of many businesses’ marketing. With plugins like Wordpress SEO, you can decide how different pages should look when shared on Facebook, for example. With this plugin, you can, for example, set default images but also ensure that the “right” image appears on Facebook when you share the address.
What many people don’t know is that Facebook saves all sharing data on its own servers to avoid having to retrieve images and text every time a post is shared, which is usually a very good feature as it is kind to your own server. Once the data has been there for 30 days, Facebook updates the data. But if, for example, you share a post internally via Facebook Messenger before it is finalised, or if you want to change the sharing image after the post has been published, this becomes a problem.
One way to solve this in the past has been to manually tell Facebook to update its cache, but if you have a lot of posts, this can be a very time-consuming task.
After many of our customers encountered this problem, we decided to write a plugin that solves this, called Facebook Open Graph Scraper. Every time a page/post is created or changed, the plugin tells Facebook to empty its cache and retrieve the new information. This way you can always be sure that when your post is shared on Facebook, the right image and text are included.
The plugin is free and can be downloaded via the official WordPress plugin database.