How to Set an Image for the Home Page of Your Site for Facebook Sharing

We’ve all experienced it… we share our site on Facebook and some random image auto populates from a post we wrote years ago or we get a dreaded white space. Typically,  a reader can share an image to Facebook just fine within a particular blog post or page but there are times that random images or white spaces show up. If a post or page has no photos and a reader tries to share from that page and if a reader is sharing from the home page of a site.

In order to set a specific image for your home page, I recommend using the  Yoast SEO plugin.  You’ll just need the free version for this so don’t feel like you need to get the premium version unless you want the features available with that.

You’ll  install this plugin and activate it from your WordPress dashboard.  Once the plugin is activated you’ll see a new link on your left sidebar that says SEO.

Setting the image for your home page

STEP 1

Navigate to SEO > Social > Facebook (tab at the top) and make sure you have this setting enabled.

STEP 2

Next, you’ll see the Image URL fields under the Frontpage Settings as well as the Default Settings.  You’ll click the Upload Image button to upload your own images to these spaces.

Getting the image to appear in Facebook

Now, if you’ve attempted to share your link before, which I’m assuming you have since you’re reading this tutorial, Facebook will remember the old image settings so we need to be able to go tell them we’ve updated our image and to “recrawl” our site.

You’ll go right here to the Facebook Debugger tool (you will need to be logged in to your account).

Once there, you’ll enter your domain name into the Sharing Debugger field and hit the Debug button.  Let it run its course and it will pop up with your new image.

If you’re running this and aren’t seeing your updates, please run it a few times for it to pop up.