og:image not showing on Facebook? Fix these in order

Facebook renders more link cards than any other platform, so its image failures are the ones everyone sees first. The causes are a short list, and the fastest fix is to work through them in this order rather than guessing.

1. The image URL does not fetch

Open the og:image value directly in a browser. It must load the image itself — not a page containing it, not a redirect to a CDN error, not a login wall. Relative paths are not resolved; the value must be a complete https URL.

2. The image is too small

Under 600x315 Facebook abandons the large card for a small square thumbnail beside the text. Under 200x200 it drops the image altogether. Export at 1200x630 and the problem cannot occur.

3. The format is wrong

Facebook does not render SVG social images. If your framework points og:image at a vector logo, export a PNG or JPEG for sharing and reference that instead.

4. The crawler is blocked

robots.txt rules, hotlink protection and WAF bot filters can refuse the facebookexternalhit crawler while serving everyone else. Check that a plain unauthenticated request for both the page and the image succeeds.

5. Facebook cached the broken version

This is the step everyone forgets. Facebook stores the first scrape of a URL and reuses it indefinitely, so a fixed image keeps showing as broken until you force a refresh. Paste the URL into Meta's Sharing Debugger and choose Scrape Again — the next share uses the new card.

Run the whole list at once

The Facebook debugger page on this site checks the image URL, measures its real dimensions and weight, flags blocking risks, and links straight to the Sharing Debugger for the re-scrape — the full checklist in one paste.