Have you ever posted a link to your website on a Facebook group and noticed the cute little thumbnail that shows up for everyone else, shows up blank for you?? GAH! You might also have come across that posting a blog post has a similar problem, where Facebook grabs a different post image to display. Random madness!

Well there are a couple of ways to fix this Facebook blank thumbnail easily, so let's get to it, shall we?

This is probably best shown via a video tutorial so you will find one below at the bottom of this post. I also added the written directions in case you are a super quick learner and rather just glance through the answer (that's me).

You could fix this Facebook thumbnail issue in a couple of different ways, including adding a piece of code to one of your .php files. The horror, I know. But who wants to mess with code? Not me. And I am a developer. Not that I want to add any more plugins to a website than necessary, but in this particular case, you might actually benefit two fold from the plugin(s) that will fix this. :-).

To fix a blank Facebook thumbnail from showing up:

These instructions assume you are using a WordPress blog.

1- First you need to install an SEO plugin called ALL IN ONE SEO. It is a free plugin. If you already have this, then you are one step ahead. If you don't have this plugin it is actually a great addition to your blog as it will help you optimize (SEO) all your blog posts too! You DEFINITELY should have an SEO plugin installed anyway! Please note, if you already have a plugin like Yoast SEO installed, this one ALSO has the social media thumbnail fix in its choices so no need to also install All In One SEO. 

2- From the All In One menu, click on Feature Manager.

3- You will see several features you can activate here. But stay with me and at this time only activate the SOCIAL META feature.

4- Once this is active, it will display as a menu item under your ALL IN ONE SEO menu along your WordPress Admin bar

5- Select the Social Meta menu and here you will see a myriad of options available to you on how to display your images on social media. You can select to use the featured images as thumbnails for your blog posts and even select a default image if no featured image was uploaded. Or no thumbnail image at all if you wish. If you scroll thru the options you will also see the option to select a thumbnail image to display when you share your direct website link on Facebook, for example. You don't need to upload anything in either case, you just pick from the images in your library which I assume probably already contains the image you want as your thumbnail (or else, you can just upload one).

And THAT IS ALL you need to do to fix the issue with Facebook showing a blank thumbnail when sharing your websites or when Facebook shows a random image when sharing a post (instead of its feature image).

Hope that helps you fix it. Here is a quick video to show you where all these choice are located.

PS: You can accomplish the same results if you already have or rather install the Yoast SEO plugin.

If these instructions helped you fix this, please leave me a comment below. That'd be cool. Thanks! 🙂