Did you get no thumbnails when sharing or posting a link on Facebook, with a wrong title with URL only text with no link description? This may bother bloggers and webmasters a lot, they obviously want proper titles and description with an interactive pic or thumbnail while sharing the links on Facebook, this will help grabbing the attention of people by giving a quick overview of what the link is about.

avoid no thumbnails issue with facebook share

As you know, whenever you share or like links, Facebook shows it in a proper format most of the times, the title, the description and the thumbnail – all this information is fetched from the location of that link. But, Why No thumbnail on Facebook link shares then?

Facebook has a huge mechanism to handle social profiles of many billions of people from around the world, so problems like no thumbnails and no titles while sharing your blog posts or other links – are the short ones. To solve such problems and to make websites Facebook friendly, Open Graph Protocol was introduced in 2010.

Fix No Thumbnail / Wrong title issue with Facebook share

I’m giving in a few methods which can help to fix this problem, if you want back those missing thumbnail on Facebook.

Facebook No thumbnails issue – the Simple Fix

This applies to those blogs who want simple alteration and a relevant thumbnail each time when their link is shared on Facebook. You just have to add the following code just above the </head> tag in the markup (HTML) of your website:

<link rel="image_src" type="image/jpeg" href="YOUR_IMAGE_URL_HERE"/>

If you are on WordPress, you should use Add image_src Meta Tag to do above thing without going into the code.

Fix Facebook No thumbnails issue in WordPress with Open Graph

WordPress users can search the WordPress plugin directory for a simple plugin allowing Facebook Open Graph Integration, but I recommend you to go with WP Facebook Open Graph protocol.

facebook no thumbnails no title problem solution

This plugin, after installation, will add Open Graph XML namespace (xmlns:og) in the HTML tag of your website to make Open Graph tags supportable. It will help Facebook to automatically detect the Title of your page or post (fb:title), the image associated with it (fb:image, if any) and the description (fb:description, which will be extracted from the content). Further, in the plugin options, you can add Facebook application ID(fb:app_id, if any), Facebook Admin Profile (fb:admins), Facebook Fan Page ID (fb:page_id, optional) and a default Image URL which will be fetched by Facebook in case your page or post do not have any images.

For the advance WordPress users who want to do it themselves without installing any plugins, read this nice tutorial on WPBeginner.

If you’re still not able to see proper thumbnail, title and description in your links, you should debug your URL using Facebook URL Linter.

If you are on some other CMS, you should ask it’s support for proper Facebook Open Graph Integration.