You’ve written a blog post and published it on your WordPress site. Great! Now, you want to let your Facebook followers and fans know about it.
So you copy the link to the blog post, open up Facebook, write a bit of copy, add some hashtags, paste the link, and confidently hit “post” (or “publish” if you’re working in Meta Business Suite). Mission accomplished. But …
Later, you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed, see your post, and it looks, well, wonky. The thumbnail image might be too small, distorted, cropped weirdly, or just not there at all. Either way, when you share something you’ve worked hard to write and publish, you want it to look nice on the screen.
We get it! Lots of nonprofits (and businesses and individuals) have the same problem. The good news is, it’s an easy fix and can make your Facebook posts far more appealing and professional. With these five steps, you can have your Facebook thumbnails looking top-notch in no time.
Step One — Install an SEO plugin.
In this Insight, we’ll show you how to create a nice-looking thumbnail image with or without an SEO plugin. However, we do strongly recommend you have an SEO plugin such as RankMath or Yoast installed on your website, as this will set you up for a successful site overall.
Users of Yoast may find that the following features are only accessible with a paid premium plugin, but with RankMath they are included.
Step Two — Create your thumbnail image.
For this demonstration, we created a thumbnail image in Photoshop at 1200 pixels x 630 pixels at 72dpi. You can use any photo editing program you like as long as you set your image size to 1200px x 630px. This is Facebook’s preferred thumbnail size — any other ratio/size will make you run the risk of a bad crop or Facebook squeezing the image.
Step Three — Edit your post.
Once in your post editor, scroll down until you see RankMath SEO on your post. From here, click the Social link.
If you are not using an SEO plugin and don’t want to install one at this time, you can simply change your featured image. Beware, however, that this may change the layout of your post.
Using an SEO plugin will prevent you from interfering with the operation/design setup in your WordPress theme.
Step Four - Validation
Before linking to your post on Facebook, you need to complete one more step.
Validating and testing your Facebook post ensures that you’ve done everything correctly and that it will post properly, and Facebook provides a free validation tool called Sharing Debugger to do just that.
Once the Sharing Debugger loads, simply input the link to the article you want to post and click “debug.”
If you have posted this article on Facebook before, the debugger will show you a preview of your post. This preview will show the previous thumbnail image as Facebook remembers it.
If you have not posted this article on Facebook before, you will get the message “This URL hasn’t been shared on Facebook before.” In that case, simply click on the “fetch new information” button.
If the preview still shows you the outdated version of your thumbnail image, click the “scrape again” button. Within one click or two it should load your up-to-date image.
The new image should look much better — it’s the right size, nothing is cut off or cropped out, and the graphic isn’t distorted.
Step Five - Post Away
With your Facebook post link validated, you can now feel comfortable posting on your Facebook page. Your link will display properly anytime you post. If at any time you want to change your thumbnail image for that same post, just repeat the steps above.
