How to display the correct image when sharing a property to social networks

WP Property Drive

Sharing a property to Facebook or LinkedIn has several requirements:

• The minimum allowed image dimension should be 200x200 pixels.
• The size of the image file must not exceed 8 MB.
• Use images that are at least 1200x630 pixels for the best display on high resolution devices. At the minimum, you should use images that are 600x315 pixels to display link page posts with larger images.
• Facebook’s crawler only accepts gzip and deflate encodings, so make sure your server uses the right encoding.

Pre-caching images

When content is shared for the first time, the Facebook or LinkedIn crawler will scrape and cache the metadata from the URL shared. The crawler has to see an image at least once before it can be rendered. This means that the first person who shares a piece of content won’t see a rendered image. The same happens if the image has changed or is not available.

There are three ways to avoid this and have images render on the first Like or Share action:

1. Pre-cache the image with the sharing debugger: Run the URL through the URL debugger to pre-fetch metadata for the page. This can also be used to update the image for a piece of content.
2. Use og:image:width and og:image:height Open Graph tags: Using these tags will specify the image dimensions to the crawler so that it can render the image immediately without having to asynchronously download and process it.

Updating images

We cache all images referenced based on each image’s URL, so if you replace an image:

• Use a new URL for the new image or the image won’t be updated
• Don’t remove old images, as there maybe existing stories that reference the old image
• Follow the instructions in the section above to ensure that the new image has been downloaded by our crawler.

Note that updating the image for a URL will not automatically update the preview for old shares. To do this, you must refresh the share as described here.

Troubleshooting

If you have any problems with images not being displayed correctly for a URL, try plugging in the image URL in the Sharing Debugger for any errors.

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