Add Facebook Open Graph (OG) meta tags to your WordPress site with one function

See below for a basic WordPress function that adds Facebook Open Graph OG meta tags to your WordPress site. Works with WordPress version 4.7.2 (at this site).

Facebook OG meta tags have become a standard way of making embedded links look good in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and hundreds of other sites. The idea is to give the site embedding your link some clues about the title, description, and featured image. Documentation about the OG standard can be found here.

See how my twitter feed is pulling in nicely formatted links with the image and description:

Here is the code for generating the Facebook OG meta tags in WordPress:

The resulting meta tags for this page:

<meta property="og:title" content="Add Facebook Open Graph (OG) meta tags to your WordPress site with one function"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="See below for a basic WordPress function that adds Facebook Open Graph OG meta tags to your WordPress site. Works with WordPress version 4.7.2 (at this site). Facebook OG meta tags have become a standard way of making embedded links &hellip; Continue reading &rarr;"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="article"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://lgblog.dev/2017/02/add-facebook-open-graph-og-meta-tags-to-your-wordpress-site-with-one-function/"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Laurence Gellert&#039;s Blog"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://lgblog.dev/content/uploads/2017/02/ogtags.png"/>

The software engineer in me shudders at the php global above, but that is how it is done in WordPress land! I don’t claim to be a WordPress developer and I don’t market myself as such. But my blog is hosted with WordPress (which I think does a great job). So from time to time I need to hack out a customization. I tried an existing plugin but it didn’t work (hadn’t been maintained in several months). That is a pretty common situation in the world of free plugins…

The above function should work for posts and pages. To make the image to come in make sure to actually set the featured image. If you don’t see that on the right hand menu on the edit post / page screen, you may need to add add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ ); to functions.php like I had to. Read more about that here.

Hope this helps!