Facebook link not downloading thumbnail image, title, description

Posted May 28th, 2012 in Miscellaneous Postings

Sometimes when you post a link in a Facebook status update, all you get in the little preview box is the website address that you typed in, and the thumbnail image, meta title and description are missing. This can be due to issues on your website, communication between Facebook and your website and so on. This post shows the simple way to fix the issue so Facebook downloads the information again.

Screenshot example of the error

The following screenshot shows and example of the error when Facebook has not downloaded the information from the page:

As you can see, all that is showing in the website address as copied and pasted into the status box and there's no thumbnail, title or description.

How to fix the problem

Unfortunately you can't simply start again by reloading the Facebook page and putting the link in again, as it uses cached information and won't re-download the page.

Instead, go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug, enter the website/link address into the text box on that page and click the "Debug" button.

Facebook will then download that page again, clearing its cache of the previous information. It will also show some potentially useful information about fixes you might need to make on your page which will help FB in the future.