# How websites display in Facebook links

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-websites-display-in-facebook-links/784928>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [April 21, 2017, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-websites-display-in-facebook-links/784928 "2017-04-21T15:14:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Ornery\_Bob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/da6949/32.png) [@Ornery\_Bob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ornery_Bob)\
**Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-websites-display-in-facebook-links/784928/1 "2017-04-21T15:14:49Z")

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Some links to websites will come up with a picture preview of the site and some won’t.

This is presumably at the website end of things… anyone know how this works?

I suspect my Wordpress theme is preventing Facebook from capturing a screenshot. Is there a way to manually fix it?

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**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\
**Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-websites-display-in-facebook-links/784928/2 "2017-04-21T17:22:25Z")

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> [@Ornery\_Bob](#):
>
> Some links to websites will come up with a picture preview of the site and some won’t.
> 
> This is presumably at the website end of things… anyone know how this works?
> 
> I suspect my Wordpress theme is preventing Facebook from capturing a screenshot. Is there a way to manually fix it?

I’ve never tried it myself, but [this website article from 2012](http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/control-the-image-and-text-shown-in-a-facebook-status-update/) purports to explain it. Essentially, it’s all defined by tags in the \<HEAD\>, but there’s also something on Facebook itself you can use to see how your site would look when shared, and tell it to refresh the image and text cache.

I checked the link, and it appears to still work.

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**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\
**Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-websites-display-in-facebook-links/784928/3 "2017-04-21T17:29:04Z")

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On checking further, it appears that the properties in that article are out of date. (I did warn it was from 2012.)  
[Here’s Facebook’s official web developer document on how to handle this.](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters)

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**Author:** ![Ornery\_Bob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/da6949/32.png) [@Ornery\_Bob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ornery_Bob)\
**Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-websites-display-in-facebook-links/784928/4 "2017-04-21T19:02:01Z")

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Thanks, BigT - exactly what I needed but couldn’t find on my own!