Have you ever had one of those days when technology doesn’t make sense? When something you’ve done many times suddenly doesn’t seem to work and you don’t know why?
I’m not gonna lie. I was really pissed off at Twitter last week. I had tweeted a blog post and it appeared on Twitter without a thumbnail image. The article was there, but the Twitter Card displayed this:
No, no, no. No.
Sure, I could’ve left it up like that, but I’m not that kind of girl. I kind of have a perfectionist problem. Plus, I’m just really stubborn. If you tell my husband I said that, I’ll deny it.
It turns out that I had tweeted the post but had forgotten to set the Featured Image in WordPress. So I deleted the tweet, went back and set the Featured Image, saved it, retweeted, and … nothing. Same placeholder appeared.
After checking and testing everything I could think to check and test, retweeting and deleting after each time, it still didn’t work. I did this three or four or nine times. I looked online for the answer, but all I could see was how to set the initial image in the “Featured Image” box, which I had done. If you’re not picturing smoke coming out of my ears at this point, please do so now.
I went into the Social tab under Yoast SEO in WordPress and made sure the image for Twitter was set. Fixed that too. I changed the image dimensions. I checked other blog posts that had tweeted without issue to see if there were differences. I changed the image to a square instead of a rectangle. I took a walk around the parking lot and thought about life.
If you’ve ever had this happen, take heart. It’s not you, it’s Twitter.
Clearing Twitter Image Cache
Grab that cache with both hands and make a stash …
My apologies to Roger Waters.
When you tweet a link to a post, Twitter saves a copy of the original source in its cache. Once you’ve done that, there’s no turning back. The only way you can get Twitter to use a revised source is to clear its cache (not your cache, Twitter’s cache). In this case, since I had not set a Featured Image and the image-free version was cached, I had to add a parameter to the post’s URL. I renamed the URL by adding a parameter (see below) and it was all good.
If you wish to change an image you’ve already set, you can simply change the Featured Image name. You can do this by going into your Media Library, selecting the image, and renaming it by adding a parameter to the image name. This is done by adding a question mark (“?”) and characters to the end of the image like “?ver2”).
You can double-check how the post will display by using the Twitter Card Validator. Insert your post’s URL and click the Preview Card button.
Voila!
Have you ever had this happen to you? Did you come up with a different solution? If so, do tell — we’re all ears.
P.S. After all that buildup, you’re probably dying to read the post that inspired so much frustration. Here it is …
.”Ecommerce Store Mods Save Time & Money.” Enjoy!
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