Imported photos are not stored on your server. They are served from your MLS image source, and Facebook’s scraper often cannot fetch an image from there, which is why a property link can share with the right title and no picture.
The fix is to give the page an image Facebook can reach: set the property’s featured image from your own media library.
Before you start
- You have one property URL that shares badly, so you can test the same link before and after.
- You know which plugin or theme writes your social tags. MLSImport does not write any, so the tags on your listing pages come from your theme or your SEO plugin.
Why the image does not load
A shared link is fetched by Facebook’s own crawler, which reads the page and follows the image address it finds. That address points at the MLS image source rather than at your domain, and several things there can stop the fetch.
- The image host blocks crawlers it does not recognise.
- The image host refuses requests that arrive from another site rather than from a browser on your page.
- The page has no usable social image tag, so there is nothing for the crawler to fetch.
None of the three is set on your site, which is why re-importing the listing changes nothing.
Clear the cached preview first
Facebook keeps what it found the first time. A page fixed today can keep sharing yesterday’s broken preview for days.
- Open the Facebook Sharing Debugger at
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/. - Paste the property URL and click Debug.
- Click Scrape Again. A second scrape is often what makes the image appear.
- Read the warnings it lists. They name the missing or unreachable tag directly.
Expected result: the preview panel shows the image you expect. Once it does there, it works when you post the link.
Run the debugger before you share a listing you care about, not after. The first person to paste the URL into Facebook is what triggers the scrape, and whatever it sees at that moment is what everyone else gets until it is cleared.
Give the page a local image
Every property gets a featured image at import, taken from the feed’s preferred photo. Replacing it with an image uploaded to your media library gives the crawler something on your own domain to fetch.
- Open the property in wp-admin.
- In Featured image, choose Set featured image and upload or pick your own file.
- Update the property, then scrape the URL again in the debugger.
WordPress holds one featured image per property, so this is the social preview and the card thumbnail at the same time. Pick an image that works in both places.
A featured image you set by hand lasts only while the MLS photo set stays the same. When the listing’s photos change, the import rebuilds the gallery and puts the feed’s preferred photo back as the featured image. Treat a manual image as something to reapply on the listings you actively market, not as a permanent setting.
If it does not work
- The debugger reports no image tag at all. Nothing on the site is writing social tags. Install or configure an SEO plugin, since MLSImport does not emit them.
- The tag is there and points at the MLS image source. Your SEO plugin is using the featured image, which is still the imported one. Replace it with a local file.
- The preview is right in the debugger and wrong in the post. The post was composed before the rescrape. Delete the link from the composer and paste it again.
- A different image shows than the one you chose. Your SEO plugin has its own social image setting on the post, and it wins over the featured image.
Frequently asked questions
Can MLSImport pick a different photo from the feed for social sharing?
No. The feed marks one photo as preferred and that becomes the featured image. Choosing a different one means setting it yourself on the property.
Would importing photos into the media library fix this?
It would, and it is not how the plugin works. Photos stay on the MLS image source, which keeps your disk use and your backups small and keeps you inside the display rules most boards set on stored imagery.
Does the same problem affect other networks?
It can. Anything that fetches a preview by crawling the page hits the same image host, so LinkedIn, X and messaging apps behave the same way. A local featured image fixes them together.
Why does the title share correctly when the image does not?
Because the title is text inside the page and the crawler already has it. The image is a second request to a different server, and that is the request that fails.
Related
- SEO for imported listings
- What MLSImport is and how it works
- The Select Import fields screen
- How to report an issue so we can fix it fast
Send us a property URL that shares badly and we will tell you which tag on the page is the problem.