Here’s a quick and easy tip: Ever notice when you share a link on facebook from your blog, it either doesn’t have an image or it’s not the image you want? With WordPress, controlling that image is easy. Just use the Featured Image option that comes with every WordPress website. You might not have ever noticed it before because it’s way down on the right hand side.
Adding images here is easy. Just click on “Set featured image” and add a picture like you normally would through your media library. You can either upload it or select from an image you’ve already uploaded. Just click the big blue “Set featured image” button at the bottom right of the pop-up box. If you change your mind, don’t worry because there is a “Remove featured image” link under the image where you can get rid of that one and start over.
If you’re not seeing the Featured Image option on your bottom right, go up to the very top and click the button next to Screen Options. It will open a drop down box where you can check off Featured Image.
Once you have your featured image set, that is the image that will show up when you post the link to the article on facebook. Wasn’t that easy? You can test it for yourself. I have set up the featured image for this post like this:
Copy the url from the top of your browser and paste it into your facebook feed. You’ll see the image automatically comes up! Here’s how it looked when I posted it:
So if you have your blog posts set to automatically publish or if you want to control the picture that shows up when other people share the link, be sure to set your featured image!
Quick tip: I made my image 468px x 245px.
Note: If you have All in One SEO plugin enabled, you will need to make sure to have the correct settings applied. Here is what you need to do:
From your left hand menu, choose All in One SEO > Features Manager, and then enable Social Meta. Then under the Social Meta settings, make sure your image is set to featured image:
If this is not working for you, it’s possible that you have other sharing or SEO plugins enabled that need to be set up.
Happy sharing!
Some themes still don’t support Featured Image. You may have to add add_theme_support(‘post-thumbnails’); etc. to functions.php file.
Good point! Thanks for mentioning.
I’m finding this doesn’t work for me unless it’s a post that’s actually showing the featured image. For example, my blog posts have a featured image and it shows up in the content. That works great. But on any other page or post, it doesn’t seem to be working to just designate a featured image. Facebook is still showing a random logo from the footer of my site.
You didn’t list your website here, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on for you. Do you have any SEO or sharing plugins installed?
Thanks I will try this and activate it, let’s give it a go and hope it helps me solve this problem.
Still didn’t work. Darn