Updated October 2026: Setting a social image for a specific post or page is part of the free Yoast SEO plugin. Only the social preview is a Yoast SEO Premium feature.
WordPress usually does a good job of selecting the correct image from your posts to share on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn. But what if you want to set a default image for your entire site or customize the shared image for a specific post? This is very easy using the free WordPress SEO plugin Yoast.
Prefer to watch? This two-minute video walks through both methods.
Setting a Default Social Media Image
It’s always a good idea to set a default social media image for pages that don’t have a set featured image or do have an image that doesn’t get pulled in by social media pages because of placement or size. This default image is usually a high-quality version of your company’s logo, but could also be a custom image created for this purpose.
- In your site’s left-hand navigation, hover over Yoast SEO and select Settings.
- Under General, choose Site basics.
- Find Site image, press the Select image button and either upload a new image or select an existing image from your media library.
- Press the Save changes button.
Yoast uses this image as the fallback for any post or page that doesn’t have an image of its own.
Setting a Social Media Image for a Specific Page
Sometimes a post or page either doesn’t have a suitable image for social media sharing or you would like to use a different image on social media than what is on the page itself. The Yoast plugin also makes this very easy.
- Find the Yoast SEO section of the page or post you are editing. It is generally at the bottom of the page.
- Select the Social tab. This opens the Social media appearance settings.
- Under Social image, press the Select image button and then either upload the custom image you want to use or select an image from your media library.
- (Optional) Fill in the Social title and Social description.
- Scroll down and open X appearance. X has its own image, title and description fields. If you leave them empty, X uses the social settings above.
- Press the Select image button and then either upload the custom image you want to use or select an image from your media library.
- (Optional) Fill in the X title and X description.
- Publish or update the page or post you are editing.
What Size Should the Images Be?
For the share image, 1200 x 630 pixels is the standard size for Facebook and works well on most other platforms, although there is no single universal size. Yoast itself recommends 1200 x 675 pixels for the default site image.
For your organization’s logo, Google asks for an image of at least 112 x 112 pixels. You set the logo under Yoast SEO, then Settings, then Site representation.
Troubleshooting Social Media Share Issues
If after setting your default or custom social media image you still don’t see it when you share to Facebook or X, it is possible the old image may be cached.
Clearing the Facebook Cache
To fix this issue for Facebook, you can use the Facebook Sharing Debugger.
- Enter the URL of the page or post from your site that you just updated in the box at the top of the page.
- If the image on the resulting page is not the image you were expecting, hit the scrape again button and Facebook will try again.
- If you are still not seeing the correct image, you may need to clear your website’s cache (or wait 10-15 minutes and try again).
Clearing the X (Twitter) Cache
Although the Card Validator page for X still exists, it no longer allows you to update or view your social images. X has not implemented a new way to do this, instead, you just need to wait for its crawler to visit your page, which will then update it. According to the company, it should visit sites in its index about once a week.
Clearing the LinkedIn Cache
LinkedIn’s Post Inspector can be used to clear your social images on LinkedIn. It’s a very simple process where you just paste in your URL and LinkedIn will automatically update the info from your post and show you the results.
