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What is the Facebook Debugger?

Facebook Debugger is a free online tool that helps control what others see when sharing blog posts on Facebook. It's essential for brands with Facebook pages because previews sometimes appear incorrectly.

How Does Facebook Select the Image and Caption for Your Blog Posts?

When a blog post is shared on Facebook, it generates a preview with an image and caption. Facebook previews include an:

1. Introduction
2. Image
3. Caption

The introduction is the message one writes when sharing a Facebook post. Facebook's crawler selects the image and caption by scraping the web page's HTML. The information is stored in Facebook's cache for 30 days. If your Open Graph tags are not set up correctly, the wrong image and caption may appear in the preview. Facebook Debugger can help by generating a report after testing your web page.

How to Use the Facebook Debugger Tool

The Facebook Debugger tool allows for control over Facebook post previews.

Step 1: Go to the Facebook Debugger Tool.

You can access the Debugger tool directly on the Sharing Debugger page.

Or, navigate to Facebook for Developers > More > Tools > Sharing Debugger.

You'll need to sign in if you still need to log in.

The Debugger tab is the default, but first-time users should ensure the "Sharing Debugger" is selected.

Step 2: Input the website address of the page you wish to test.

Input the web address of the page to be reviewed. You can check a post from your blog or any page from your website. Afterward, click "Debug" and wait for the results.

Step 3: Review Facebook Debugger Results

The Debugger quickly examines your web page and generates a report. The report includes warnings, the last scraped time, fetched and canonical URLs, and a Facebook preview.

Below is an example of what the Debugger report looks like.

The top of the report, titled “warnings,” shows issues that need to be fixed on your page. Next, it tells you when the page was last scraped and lists the fetched and canonical URLs.

You’ll notice a full preview that shows what your blog post or page will look like when shared to Facebook

Step 4: Clear the Caches

If your WordPress or Facebook post preview does not appear as intended, try clearing the cache. An outdated preview version may be displayed due to outdated versions of WordPress or Facebook. 

To remove the cache on WordPress, select the WordPress cache. Choose "Scrape Again" on the Debugging report to clear the Facebook cache. If the preview is still incorrect, proceed to the next step to make the necessary adjustments.

Step 5: Make any necessary adjustments to the Open Graph settings

If your blog post preview isn't fixed after clearing your WordPress and Facebook caches, check the lower half of the Facebook Debugger report for more information. The report offers full details that your website's back-end team can use to correct the problem. If the previews still aren't showing correctly, you may have an issue with your Open Graph tags (og tags). 

These tags are bits of code that are manually added to your pages. They help integrate Facebook with other websites by making them rich "graph" objects. Og tags are also used for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google. Adding Open Graph tags to your website won't directly affect your on-page SEO, but it will influence the performance of your links on social media, so it's worth looking into.

Step 6: Verify Changes by Re-running Facebook Debugger

After identifying and fixing issues with your preview, straightforward WordPress and Facebook caches before using the Facebook Debugger tool again.

Best of luck.