Social sharing image
admin, June 13, 2020
Sometimes when you share a link on the social media the image associated with the link gets cut off or it doesn’t get displayed properly. Below are some answers to the questions. Basically there are three scenarios:
Search engine (e.g. Google) will always look to display an image associated with the link being shared:
- It will look in the code (meta tags) for the designated image for that particular social media platform. That’s the best option since the image will be sized correctly to be displayed on a particular social media platform.
- If the above is not specified in the code, the search engine will look next for any image on the page and that might sometimes result in an image that is not displayed properly, but hey, at least you have an image accompanying your link summary.
- If both options are not available then it will just display the summary and the title of the post and no image.
There are several platforms the websites are built on and there is a way to control how the sharing image gets displayed when shared on social media:
If the website is created using the following platform:
- CUSTOM – social media sharing image and all other related info are controlled in the custom code. You can read an article about it and see an example here.
- WORDPRESS – one of the options is using the YOAST plugin. See a screenshot example here.
- SQUARESPACE – more info on how to control social media sharing images here.
- WIX – social sharing image on this platform can be displayed per page and you can read more about it here.
- WEEBLY – has an option to include the custom code as in the example in the 1st bullet under custom.
Facebook also offers a Sharing Debugger tool to flush the cached content in order to display a correct image.