Change a Facebook Thumbnail with Yoast SEO Plugin

Whispered like gospel around the halls of those who use Word Press is the Yoast SEO plugin.

While this plugin is a useful tool for managing page settings and providing guidance for the key factors currently believed to influence search engine rankings, the Yoast SEO plugin has another awesome benefit.

It enables you to easily control how your the Facebook thumbnail when you post a website link on Facebook.

When you post one of your website links on a Facebook post there is an image, a title and a description. Sometimes these appear exactly how you like and sometimes they are a bit wonky. This is because Facebook is pulling the image, title and description from your website code.

Rather than figuring how to change your website code .. . or just letting it look wonky because the last thing you want to do is figure out to change your website code, you can easily change the image, title and description with the Yoast SEO plugin.

After installing the plugin, WordPress SEO by Yoast control panel will appear directly beneath the editing pane when you are creating or changing a Post or Page. Notice there are four tabs in the control panel: “General”, “Page” Analysis”, “Advanced” and “Social”. In the “Social” Tab there are three areas that allow you to change the Facebook Title, Description and Image.

If you don’t like what Facebook is pulling from your code then just fill those fields out and you are good to go.

Notice in the example above I changed the description and not the title since I was content with the title that Facebook was pulling for the thumbnail.