How to Clear or Update Facebook’s Featured Image Cache

Have you updated a featured image or graphic on a web page, blog post or home page of a website only to find that when you share the link to Facebook, it still shows the old image? Like most social media platforms, Facebook caches a lot of the content, especially the featured image which is the primary image that shows up on a link share. If you ever change that image, say during the initial editing / publishing process (it happens to us often as we update a lot of website) then you’ll want to make sure that the most current image is properly. This article shows you how to clear / update Facebook’s link cache.

Before / After Featured Images

The following screenshots show a real life before/after example of the featured images on Facebook. This was from one of our portfolio websites for Argonaut Manufacturing.

First step is to make sure that the post and/or website has been assigned a featured image. Depending on the platform you use (WordPress, Wix, Square Space, etc.) the area to add a featured image will differ. Once this is complete, you’ll want to copy the link of the post and take it over to get “de-bugged”!

Facebook has a special website that will scrape and debug your link to make sure it has the most recent and updated featured image: Facebook Debugger.

1. Go to Facebook’s Debugger Webpage.
2. Paste link into space and click “debug”
3. See the new image and information pop up!*

* If the image does not pop up immediately, click on “scrape again” until the updated image comes up. Once this is complete, you are ready to go with your link share on Facebook. Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 scrapes to get it all updated.

The cool part about this debugging website is that it will let you know the last time that the link was scraped. So if was last scraped more than a year ago, you definitely want to make sure to scrape again just to make sure all of the updated content is picked up as well.

Here’s another before and after cache.