How To Choose Cover Photo For Blog Post Link

Learn to set the image that displays when your posts or pages are shared on social media

Making your website and blog posts easy to share is important if you're trying to grow your audience. The easier you make it to share, the more likely others are to spread the word about you with just a couple of clicks.

Krista here! Something that stumps a lot of new WordPress users is how they can decide what images display on social media when someone shares a blog post or page on their website so today we'll go through the simple steps you can take to make sure the right images are getting shared.

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Use the Featured Image setting

The first thing you want to do is make sure all of your blog posts and pages have a Featured Image set. Especially if there's something specific you'd like displayed when your post is shared.

For example, here at Coded Creative, we want to make sure our blog posts look great when they're shared on Twitter so our featured images for blog posts are sized at 1024×512 and look like this:

To set your Featured Image, scroll down in your page or post underneath the Publish button. There you'll see a link that says Set featured image.Clicking it will bring you to your media library where you can either upload something new or choose an image you already have on your website.

Set your default image

The next thing you'll want to do is set the default image that is shared if you don't have a featured image set and there aren't any other images on a specific page for social media sites to pull from. Out favorite way to do this is with the Yoast SEO plugin.

Facebook

After installing Yoast SEO, go to SEO > Social > Facebook to get started. Since Facebook tends to be the trickiest platform to make cooperate, it's a good place to start.

From there, make sure Add Open Graph meta data is enabled. That way, social media networks can see that data and know what to use when your website is being shared.

Then, head to the Frontpage settings section. These settings are used as defaults when the front page of your site is shared. Be sure to set an image that gives a good idea of what your brand is all about, use the name of your business for the Title, and your tagline for the Description.

And the last thing you want to do for Facebook is set the default image URL. That way, if you ever have a post or page without an image, there will be an on-brand image that is shared by default to go along with it.

Twitter

To make sure your posts look like ours when they're shared on Twitter, there are a couple extra quick steps to follow. Go to SEO > Social > Twitter and make sure Add Twitter card meta data is enabled. That way, Twitter can read the information it needs to make attractive cards for your site.

You should also set the default card type to Summary with large image to make your posts as eye-catching as possible when they're shared.

What to do when it's not working

Sometimes you'll find that, despite following the above steps, Facebook is still being stubborn and either showing a random image or nothing at all. That's because, once your page is shared Facebook caches a version of it to use for the future and can be kinda lazy about getting fresh information.

To make Facebook grab new information for your post or page, head to the Sharing Debugger and enter the URL of the page that needs to be refreshed.

If you see that the image isn't quite right, click the Scrape Again button refresh the information. Almost every time, this will do the trick!

How does your website look on social media?

If you haven't checked recently, head over to your favorite social media platforms and share one of your posts. Take a look at what kind of text and images are being displayed. If you realize something isn't looking quite right, revisit the above steps to get it all fixed up!