Why isn't my Facebook link preview updating? (cache-busting guide)
This isn't a bug in your tags — it's Facebook's cache. The first time anyone shares a URL, Facebook scrapes it once and stores the result; every share of that exact URL after that reuses the cached version, sometimes for weeks, regardless of what you change on the page afterward. If you fixed the tags and the preview still looks wrong, the fix almost certainly worked — Facebook just hasn't re-scraped it yet.
Why it matters
This trips people up because the natural instinct is to keep re-editing tags that are already correct, or to assume the checker tool is lying. Meanwhile the actual fix takes about ten seconds and doesn't involve touching the page at all. It matters most right after a rebrand, a redesign, or fixing a broken og:image — exactly the moments when you most need the new preview to show up immediately, and exactly when the stale cache is most likely to bite.
How to fix it
- Open Facebook's Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) and paste the URL in.
- Click "Scrape Again" — this forces Facebook to re-fetch the page and refresh its cached preview.
- If the tags still look wrong after re-scraping, the problem is in your HTML, not the cache — check the tags actually render (view source, not dev tools, since some frameworks only inject them client-side).
- LinkedIn has an equivalent (Post Inspector) with the same caching behavior — check there too if the LinkedIn preview specifically is stale.
- There's no cache-buster for Slack or iMessage previews other than changing the URL (e.g. adding a query string) — usually not worth doing for a one-off fix.
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