An SSL Story: how to fix preview thumbnails not showing on Facebook and Twitter from your website pages

Freely-usable via Unsplash.

I have a website, and recently, when I went to Facebook to paste a link to a post from it, I was horrified to see that my post did not have a preview image.

I’ve seen this happen before. Sometimes, I would just backspace my link out and then paste it back in, and the thumbnail would re-appear. It didn’t.

No worries. I’ve seen that too. All I’ve had to do is go to the Facebook debugging tool. There, I could paste the link, and then then get the Facebook crawler to scrape the page again and hopefully pick up the image.

This time, though, it didn’t work.

I looked around the page more to see what was going on, and then I saw a true monstrosity.

SSL issues? That’s not great.

How to fix this annoying issue