How To Change The Facebook Link Preview Photo

Do you want to know how to change the Facebook link preview photo? If so, I’m going to teach you a really easy way to change it… and you don’t have to know code in order to do so!

You used to be able to change the Facebook edit link previews within Facebook, but they had people editing their previews and misleading readers. So unfortunately, the old way no longer works.

Today, I’m going to show you how to change the Facebook link preview photo – the easy way!

Here’s what you need for my simple step-by-step…

1. A self-hosted WordPress site
2. Yoast SEO plugin (free)

The Yoast SEO plugin allows you to update and edit OPEN GRAPH TAGS.

Open graph tags on your website provide Facebook with the information it needs to fill a link preview. If a link thumbnail image, title or description doesn’t appear when you paste a link on Facebook, it’s because those open graph tags weren’t created correctly.

The Yoast SEO plugin allows me (and you) to manually override what is sent to Facebook.

We recently did a Restyle Site + Logo Design for Kelly of The Tattered Pew and her Facebook link preview photo no longer matched her new branding. So we’ll use her as our real life example AND the steps we took to update her old Facebook link preview photo (seen below).

Steps on How to Change the Facebook Link Preview Photo

Step 1: Install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin, if you don’t have it installed already.

Step 2: In the WordPress dashboard, go to SEO > SOCIAL > FACEBOOK and make sure ‘open graph meta data’ is enabled.

Step 3a: Either add a custom image by uploading one into the ‘image url’ area (1200 pixels wide x 630 pixels high is a good image size). Below was The Tattered Pew’s old image seen in the Facebook preview link.

OR

Step 3b: You can leave the ‘image url’ area blank and you’ll have several preview options to choose from when placing your link in Facebook.

We did Step 3b for Kelly, and so now Facebook is pulling images from her homepage. (See below)

Step 4: Have Facebook scrape your site, so that the changes you’ve made will take effect. How?

-Go to Facebook’s Open Graph Object Debugger tool HERE.

-Place your website url in the field

-Click on ‘Fetch New Scrape Information’ button.

The next time you share your url link on Facebook, it should pull the new information from the updated Open Graph Tags.

Now you know how to change the Facebook link preview photo – the easy way! Enjoy.