Facebook thumbnail of my wordpress website disappear after a while. Any idea why?

Question

I have a page with OpenGraph meta tags and when I first published the page it worked like a charm:

https://stargazerrock.com/stargazer-definition/

Now, after a few weeks, somehow my post does not show the image at all. (it shows a gray rectangle, though.)

The Facebook debug tool, here:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

does show the image correctly.

This happens with many of my Wordpress & Drupal posts, which is problematic.

Remember what I said: at first it works. It's only after a while when I go back to my page that somehow the image is gone.

An example of such a post is this one (although I reposted in an attempt to fix the problem, but nothing got fixed, it's still missing the picture.)

https://www.facebook.com/StargazerRock/posts/1298528993624239

If it were just one post, I would ignore the problem, but now it's been like 10 posts that lost their image.

Important Note: I do my Facebook posting manually as I know that using a tool, or even just AddThis.com can create problems to the posts. That's also how I know that it worked the first time I posted. I also first use the debug too mentioned above to make sure I get a thumbnail.

As a side note: I noticed a similar problem on Twitter, but I've noticed that with many websites (not just mine) so I'm less worried about that one at the moment.

---

From 's answer, I see that the debugger uses a different CDN than the one used when I post:

https://external.fsnc1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php
  ?d=AQD6wD86Mtgq9AOg
  &w=540
  &h=282
  &url=https%3A%2F%2Fstargazerrock.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F11%2Fstar-gazers-on-fence.jpg
  &cfs=1
  &upscale=1
  &fallback=news_d_placeholder_publisher
  &_nc_hash=AQBCV5QWsIV2g_q6

vs

https://external-mxp1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php
  ?d=AQARAAMY4iCsZ3kW
  &w=476
  &h=249
  &url=https%3A%2F%2Fstargazerrock.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F11%2Fstar-gazers-on-fence.jpg
  &cfs=1
  &upscale=1
  &fallback=news_d_placeholder_publisher
  &_nc_hash=AQAeGBKWZLbtEZ8g

The main domain, the d and the _nc_hash parameters differ. The debugger is supposed to clear the cache, I'm wondering why would it miss that other server. But I would imagine that it's a bug at Facebook... unfortunately.

Answer 1

I inspected your page

That image is an html img tag that points at an https url that stores your image.

<img class="scaledImageFitWidth img" src="https://external-mxp1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/safe_image.php?d=AQARAAMY4iCsZ3kW&amp;w=476&amp;h=249&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fstargazerrock.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F11%2Fstar-gazers-on-fence.jpg&amp;cfs=1&amp;upscale=1&amp;fallback=news_d_placeholder_publisher&amp;_nc_hash=AQAeGBKWZLbtEZ8g" alt="" width="476" height="249">

This is your url. It is not a static .png asset hosted on a cloud server (like AWS s3)

This is your host. fbcdn stands for Facebook cdn. Probably they are using this cdn to make sure that your link is safe

https://external-mxp1-1.xx.fbcdn.net

This is the query performed to your host to get that image. You can find it after the ? sign in your url.

D could be the id of your image

d=AQARAAMY4iCsZ3kW

w stands for width in pixels

w=476

h stands for height

h=249

the url of your static asset. You are hosting it on https://stargazerrock.com

url=https%3A%2F%2Fstargazerrock.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F11%2Fstar-gazers-on-fence.jpg

some other params

cfs=1

size 1/1

upscale=1

fallback url

fallback=news_d_placeholder_publisher

irrelevant parameters

_nc_hash=AQAeGBKWZLbtEZ8g

This is the image url you are pointing to

https://stargazerrock.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/star-gazers-on-fence.jpg

You can avoid this issue by uploading your picture to facebook.