Why won’t my Facebook link photo update?
Have you ever shared a post to Facebook from your website to discover the old image is loading?
When you share a link on Facebook, it is getting cached by their servers for quicker posting by others. That is great for Facebook, but what if you change the photo and want it to immediately be changed? Fortunately there are two solutions:
- Wait for Facebook to update their cache.
- Hack the URL and force Facebook to recache.
To force Facebook to recache your webpage, simply add ?today=11-15-2011 to your URL. Any date would work. Anything after ? would work as well, but dates seem easier to type for someone unfamiliar with URL structure.
For example:
If I share calvingilbert.com on Facebook, but the wrong picture is popping up I would paste this link instead: calvingilbert.com?today=11-15-2011. The slight change in the URL will force Facebook to update it on their end.
NOTE: This trick also works on the title and description as well.
