Social media image dimensions: Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Twitter

This article started in 2013 as a list of pixel sizes for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. The platforms have changed their layouts many times since. The dimensions below are updated for sharing and previews in 2026, with Google+ only as a historical note.

For WordPress editors, the point is not memorizing every profile banner. It is delivering a good og:image, knowing when Pinterest needs a different format, and understanding why the scraper caches the old image after you replace the file in the Media Library. The same failure shows up when someone pastes the URL into a Facebook group, a WhatsApp chat, or a LinkedIn thread: the preview comes from the meta tags, not from your Instagram feed.

#How link previews work on Facebook and X

When someone pastes your URL into Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, or a post on X, the scraper downloads the HTML and reads the meta tags. The main ones are Open Graph (og:title, og:description, og:image) and, for X, Twitter Cards (twitter:card, twitter:image). Meta’s documentation: Sharing / images. Protocol: ogp.me.

WordPress core does not output a complete Open Graph set on its own. That comes from SEO plugins, the theme’s wp_head hooks, or a custom plugin. Without og:image, the platform falls back to a random image from the page: often a 200 px logo or a footer icon.

A practical checklist before you fight over exact pixels:

1. An absolute HTTPS URL to the image (not a relative path).
2. A public file, with no login and no hotlink blocking.
3. Enough width and height that the platform does not upscale a soft JPEG.
4. Important text inside a safe zone in the centre, not in the corners.

#og:image size for Facebook in 2026

For link sharing, a horizontal image of about 1200 x 630 pixels (ratio ~1.91:1) is still the safe choice. Smaller images technically work, but they look soft on large screens and on some ad surfaces.

Profile photo, cover, and Stories have their own UI dimensions, which Meta changes more often than the Open Graph standard. Use Meta’s help pages to design the page itself; use 1200x630 (or larger in the same ratio) for article and landing page graphics.

Common mistakes in WordPress themes:

• The featured image is a 16:9 video frame and the scraper crops off the face or the logo.
• The theme points og:image at a WebP URL, a format some scrapers have historically had trouble with; JPEG or PNG remain the safe choice for sharing files.
• The same file serves as the hero (wide) and as the Open Graph image (cropped) without its own crop.

Test with the Sharing Debugger. After changing the image, scrape again. If the CDN caches the same URL as immutable, upload the file under a new name and update the meta tag.

The exact figures are in Meta’s documentation on images for sharing. The minimum accepted dimension is 200 x 200 pixels. Link posts with a large image need at least 600 x 315; below that the image still appears, but in the small format. For high-resolution displays Meta recommends 1200 x 630 or more, with the ratio as close to 1.91:1 as possible, and the file must not exceed 8 MB.

#Twitter Card image size on X

X inherited Twitter Cards. For articles and products the usual choice is the Summary Card with Large Image. X no longer publishes an image table for this card, so there is no official pixel figure to quote. In practice the horizontal 1200x630 master built for Facebook’s Open Graph also serves this card in most newsrooms.

twitter:card should be summary_large_image when you want a large image. Without that tag, the preview can fall back to a small square card even when og:image is correct.

The X profile banner is a different dimension and changes with the UI. It belongs in the brand manual, not in the og:image of every post. Keep the sharing graphic and the banner as two separate assets.

At the last check of this article (17 October 2026), the Summary Cards page on X’s developer site redirected to the platform’s general overview, without the table of image requirements. Check that twitter:card and twitter:image exist in the published HTML and look at the preview in a real post before launching a campaign.

#Pinterest vertical pin size

Pinterest is where 1200x630 fails at a glance. The feed favours vertical pins close to 2:3, for example 1000 x 1500. A horizontal Open Graph image turns into a thin strip or an ugly crop.

For WooCommerce stores and inspiration or recipe content:

1. Create a vertical variant in the Media Library (or a “Pinterest image” field in the SEO plugin, if it has one).
2. Do not assume the featured image is enough if the featured image is a 16:9 hero.
3. Keep text large and legible; pins are often viewed on mobile in a narrow column.

Rich Pins (product, article, recipe) depend more on structured data and on validation in Pinterest than on exact pixel height, but the ratio still decides the clickable area in the feed.

Pinterest’s product specs page, in the section on standard image ads, recommends a 2:3 ratio, or 1000 x 1500 pixels. It accepts PNG or JPEG files up to 20 MB on desktop and 32 MB in the app, and warns that pins with an aspect ratio greater than 2:3 might get cut off in people’s feeds.

#Do Google+ dimensions still apply

Google+ for consumers was shut down in April 2019. The 940x180 cover, the ribbon photos, and the stream thumbnails from the 2013 lists are not dimensions to build new templates around.

Why the title still mentions Google+: the article ranks and has incoming links under the old path. Removing the name would create redirect noise without helping the reader. The honest approach is to say that the network no longer exists and that what counts now is Open Graph, X cards, and Pinterest.

If you find hardcoded Google+ buttons or rel=author links in old themes, remove them. They add no sharing and mark the code as outdated. In installations from 2014 to 2017 they still turn up in the footers of “magazine” themes and in abandoned social sharing plugins.

The exact date is in Google’s help: the consumer (personal) version of Google+ was shut down on April 2, 2019, and content from consumer Google+ accounts and Google+ pages has been deleted (Google’s FAQ on the shutdown). The original plan was August 2019. Google brought the shutdown forward to April after finding a bug in an API, as it explained in the announcement of the earlier date.

#What image size LinkedIn and Slack use for link previews

Most B2B sharing lands on Open Graph. LinkedIn also prefers horizontal images in the same family as Facebook. Slack and many chat clients show og:image directly. WhatsApp also relies on Open Graph style signals in the HTML when it previews a link.

That is why one good 1200x630 master is still the best investment for a corporate WordPress site. Pinterest is the exception that needs its own vertical file when the channel is actually used.

LinkedIn publishes official figures in its help article on images in link previews: a minimum of 1200 x 627 pixels, a recommended ratio of 1.91:1, and a file size of up to 5 MB. If the image meets these requirements and still does not show, the help page says the website may be blocking LinkedIn from pulling the image. Check firewall and bot-blocking rules that treat that crawler as unwanted traffic.

#Open Graph og:image width, height, and alt properties

The Open Graph protocol defines structured properties for the image in addition to the URL itself:

• og:image:secure_url, an alternate URL to use if the webpage requires HTTPS;
• og:image:type, the MIME type of the file (for example image/jpeg);
• og:image:width and og:image:height, the width and height in pixels;
• og:image:alt, a description of what is in the image, which should not be a caption. ogp.me states that if a page specifies an og:image, it should specify og:image:alt.

The dimensions have a practical effect. According to Meta’s documentation, the width and height tags tell the crawler the image size so that it can render the image immediately. Without them, the first person to share a new URL may see the post without an image, because the crawler has to process the image at least once before it shows it.

ogp.me also covers several og:image tags on one page. Multiple values are declared by repeating the meta tag, and on conflict the first tag, read from top to bottom, wins. When both the theme and the SEO plugin output og:image, the preview uses whichever comes first in the <head>, which is not always the one chosen in the editor. Look at the published source and disable the duplicate output on one side.

#How to configure og:image in WordPress

A workflow that holds up in production:

1. Define one Open Graph master size (1200x630) in the design system.
2. Register a social-share image size in the theme if you crop on the server; many teams export the finished file from Figma.
3. Set og:image (plus width and height tags if the plugin supports them) per post, or with a fallback to the featured image.
4. For X, set twitter:card to summary_large_image globally in the SEO plugin.
5. For Pinterest-oriented pages, use a dedicated field or a manual pin graphic.
6. After publishing, run the URL through Meta’s Sharing Debugger and check the twitter:* tags in the page source.

Avoid generating “title cards” with a black background and the H1 in huge type. In the feed they look alike and lose out to a product photo or a screenshot. Use a real photo, a diagram, or an interface screenshot.

#How to register a social-share image size in WordPress

If you want the server to generate the 1200 x 630 crop instead of exporting every file by hand, the add_image_size() function registers a new size from a theme or plugin:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', function () {
    add_image_size( 'social-share', 1200, 630, true );
} );

The fourth parameter decides the behaviour. With false, the default, the image is resized proportionally and may not end up at 1200 x 630. With true it is cropped to exactly those dimensions from the centre. With an array, for example array( 'center', 'top' ), you choose the crop anchor: the first value is the horizontal position (left, center, right) and the second the vertical one (top, center, bottom). For portraits and team photos, the top anchor avoids cutting off heads.

A new size only applies to future uploads. To generate the crop for images already in the Media Library, WP-CLI has wp media regenerate. With --image_size=social-share it regenerates only that size, and --only-missing limits the work to images that are missing a size:

wp media regenerate --image_size=social-share --only-missing

One more detail affects the sharing graphic. Since WordPress 5.3, images whose width or height exceeds a threshold are scaled down on upload, and the scaled version becomes the largest available size. The default threshold is 2560 pixels and is controlled by the big_image_size_threshold filter; returning false disables the scaling. A 1200 x 630 master stays far below it, but a 6000-pixel photo uploaded as a featured image is reduced to that threshold.

#Which old social media image dimensions no longer apply

The 2013 list included dimensions for Sponsored Stories, album previews, app boxes on the timeline, and Twitter background strips given in percentages. Most of those UI elements have disappeared or change so often that a blog post cannot be the source of truth.

Use official documentation for:

• profile and cover dimensions when designing the Facebook page;
• ad formats in Ads Manager (they have their own safe zones);
• Pinterest business help for current pin recommendations.

Use this article for sharing from WordPress: Open Graph, cards, the Pinterest ratio, and cache debugging.

#Why Facebook shows the wrong image when sharing a link

Typical causes, in order:

1. A wrong or missing og:image in the HTML (look at the page source, not just the SEO plugin UI).
2. A relative or HTTP URL on an HTTPS site.
3. An image behind authentication, staging basic auth, or a noindex setup the scraper cannot pass.
4. Platform cache (Meta’s Sharing Debugger).
5. A CDN or image plugin that rewrites the URL to a variant the scraper rejects.
6. Several conflicting og:image tags between the theme and the plugin.

When you change the image of a URL that has already been shared widely, a new filename is cheaper than fighting immutable caching on the same path.

Meta’s documentation explains why the new name works: images are cached based on each image’s URL, and changing the image requires a new URL. Updating the image does not change the preview of older posts either. To make a new article show an image the first time it is shared, Meta offers three routes: pre-cache the URL in the Sharing Debugger, force a new scrape through the Graph API, or declare og:image:width and og:image:height.

#Social media image dimensions for 2026 in one table

Keep the file weight reasonable (typically below a few hundred KB as a JPEG when the subject allows it) so the scraper downloads it quickly, but do not crush the quality so far that gradients band in the preview.

If the site has several languages, use the same image format across all locales unless the text in the graphic is translated. Hreflang does not change how Facebook reads og:image on the specific URL that was pasted.

When the sharing graphic, WooCommerce products, and an old theme all fight over the featured image, “set Yoast to auto” is rarely enough. It takes a deliberate crop strategy in the theme or in the editorial routine. For that kind of setup you can reach out through our WordPress developer services and get Open Graph, cards, and Pinterest variants working without guessing 2013 pixel sizes.