Why doesn’t Facebook display an image?

There are multiple reasons why Facebook or other social media platforms may not display the image you selected. Facebook, as well as many other social media platforms, uses custom metadata called OpenGraph. Read more about that in this article on social media optimization.

OK, so what could be the problem when Facebook doesn’t display the image you selected? And how can you solve it? Let’s first ask yourself the following questions:

Did you enable Open Graph tags? Make sure you do, by following the steps in this article.
Does the Facebook debug tool provide any errors about your image? If so, try to fix these errors. Read more about how to use this tool in this article.
Does your image adhere to the guidelines? So, does the image follow the Open Graph image recommendations? Are you using the Open Graph meta-tags correctly? And does the image fulfil the Open Graph meta-tag requirements?

The minimum width and height is 200 x 200 pixels while the maximum width and height we recommend is 2000 x 1600 pixels, and is less than 2mb in size. You can learn more about advanced image techniques here.

Caching

Sometimes caching is the problem. Try clearing all your caching such as from your server, theme, plugin, or CDN like Cloudflare. If you are not sure how to do that, please contact the right people such as the plugin author or host provider.

If you use Yoast SEO, you can manually set an Open Graph image for individual posts and pages. You can do that in the Social media appearance tab in the Yoast SEO sidebar. You might need to force Facebook to refresh the metadata.

The Social media appearance in the Yoast SEO sidebar

Yoast SEO Premium makes it even easier to optimize your Facebook image, as it comes with social share previews for social media, such as Facebook and X. The Social share preview visualizes what your post will look like when shared on Facebook or X. It’s immediately clear if your image fits and whether your title and description will display well.