What a sharing preview is made of

When someone pastes a link to your site into Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp or a message, the platform fetches that page and builds a small card from three things: an image, a title and a description. Your site publishes all three. You can leave them on their defaults, or set them per page.

Platforms read the card from your published site, so publish after any change you make below. Until you do, they keep seeing the old version.

The site-wide default image

1. Open Settings in the left-hand menu.
2. Open the Special Features section and find Social Sharing Image.
3. Choose one option: Use page content images lets the platform take an image from the page being shared; Use Site Logo always uses your logo; Upload custom image reveals a Custom Image field where you upload one picture used for the whole site.
4. Save, then publish.

Settings for one page

1. Open Pages, select the page, then open Social Tools.
2. Social Sharing Image starts on Use Site Properties default, which means this page follows the site-wide choice above. Pick any other option to override it for this page only.
3. Sharing Title — leave it empty and the page uses its own page title, or the site title if the page has none.
4. Sharing Description — leave it empty and the page uses its own description, or the site description if the page has none.

Only the image has an explicit "follow the site default" option. The title and description fall back on their own whenever you leave them blank, so you only need to fill them in when you want the shared card to read differently from the search result.

The preview still shows the old image or wording

This is the most common complaint, and it is almost never your settings. Facebook and LinkedIn store what they fetched the first time someone shared the link, sometimes for weeks, and keep showing that.

1. Publish your site, so the new values are actually live.
2. Open the Facebook Sharing Debugger at developers.facebook.com/tools/debug, paste the page address and click Scrape Again.
3. For LinkedIn, paste the same address into the LinkedIn Post Inspector.

Links already posted before the refresh usually keep their old card — that copy was saved at the moment of posting. New posts will pick up the new one.

Choosing a sharing image

• Around 1200 x 630 pixels works well across platforms. The field accepts far smaller images, but a small one is stretched and looks poor.
• Keep text, logos and faces away from the edges — each platform crops to a slightly different shape.
• A busy screenshot rarely reads at card size. One clear subject does.

If no preview appears at all

• The page is not published. Only published pages can be read by a sharing platform.
• The address is not public. Preview and editing addresses produce nothing — share the address on your own domain.
• There is no image to find. If Use page content images is selected and that page has no image on it, nothing is offered to the platform. Choose Use Site Logo or upload a custom image instead.
• The site is password-protected. A password set under Settings > Site Access Control stops sharing platforms reading the page, exactly as it stops search engines.

Related articles

Sharing titles and descriptions sit alongside the search metadata for the same page. See Adding metadata to your site for the page title, description and keywords that search engines read.