I was just helping my friend Ted Harty with this issue where his blog post was showing his default sharing image, not the featured image for his post.

It was a bit maddening and took some old school detective work to get it sorted but with some logic and patience we got it.

When you drop a link into Facebook, it hits your URL and looks for Open Graph metadata tags in the header of your HTML doc.. Twitter has something different but similar.

<meta property="og:type"… >
<meta property="og:url" … >
<meta property="og:title" … >
<meta property="og:description" … >
<meta property="og:image" … >

Inspecting the source code we could see that the correct image was showing up!

So we went to the Facebook Sharing Debugger and saw what it "saw"

Sure enough, our image wasn't there!

We eventually checked the warning message which stated that the image was corrupt.. Which was weird because it looked good to us..

Then I checked the file size.. 8.8 MB!

A quick trip through the image compressor got it down to under 350k.

We added the compressed image as the featured image for the blog post, waited 5 minutes for all caching layers to clear and tried again and… voila! It worked!

So the next time you're not seeing what you expect when sharing to Facebook, follow these steps to find out where the issue is.

What kind of detective tricks do you like use for your business? Drop a comment below.