Intermittent issue affecting images in Twitter cards. Images are (not consistently) failing to render in the card validator.
More often than not, when running the URL of a post through the card validator, the featured image does not render, but occasionally and inexplicably it does. After extensive communication with our host and Yoast, we have been advised to contact Twitter directly as the issue is proving difficult to resolve, not least due to the inconsistent nature of the problem. If the image specified at the following link renders in the validator when you try it, I encourage you to try one of the older posts.
I can confirm that I have completed all of the steps outlined in the following troubleshooting guide: Card error, unable to render, or no image: READ THIS FIRST.
1 Like
You are missing twitter:image tags. I know at some point it was in the docs that it would fall back to using og:image but i don’t think that ever worked very well for me - maybe try adding those in and see what happens? https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/optimize-with-cards/overview/summary-card-with-large-image
I had the same thought, so I contacted Yoast and their support team confirmed that the plugin “no longer outputs a twitter:title, twitter:image and/or twitter:description meta tag when there is already an og:title, og:image and/or og:description meta tag specified in the frontend output” because “when Twitter does not find a twitter:image tag, it will fall back to using the og:image tag”. This change was introduced in version 14.0 of the plugin, as it cuts down on the number of database lookups the plugin has to make, for what they say is “basically a redundant tag”. They have not received any reports from other users that this is causing any issues with Twitter.
When the Twitter card processor looks for tags on a page, it first checks for the Twitter-specific property, and if not present, falls back to the supported Open Graph property.
— Twitter
I can confirm from our tests, that adding the twitter:image tag manually does not appear to affect whether the summary image gets rendered, though in some instances the summary image is being rendered without the twitter:image tag. What is causing some cards to render with a summary image, and others without, is a mystery.
1 Like
We would greatly appreciate any other suggestions for how we can further our attempts to resolve this issue. A number of our clients are affected, and it would be useful to know if there are any other options available for us to explore.
One of the things that came up during our communications with Yoast support was that when testing the post permalink in the card validator, the request runs without error (albeit, the image is missing), but when testing the image permalink, the following error is returned:
ERROR: Fetching the page failed because the request timed out.
Putting the image url into the validator won’t help, as the validator expects html content, while the image url should be returning an image only - never html data.
Sometimes the timeouts are caused by slow responses - so making the html pages smaller and faster is always helpful.
I’ve seen request timeout errors also caused by TLS connectivity issues. Twitter supports TLS 1.2 and that’s what your site should be capable of supporting too, maybe https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ can help?
Thanks Igor. The error is only returned when passing an image permalink belonging to a problem post. When passing the image link of a post that validates correctly in the card validator (renders an image) the following message is returned:
INFO: Page fetched successfully
WARN: No metatags found
On your recommendation, I’ve generated an SSL report for the website. The result was an overall rating of A. I can confirm the website uses the TLS 1.2 protocol.
I intend to go back to our hosts to ask if there’s anything they can do on server side to troubleshoot/mitigate the problem. Are there any specific questions that we should be putting to them?
1 Like
our hosts to ask if there’s anything they can do on server side to troubleshoot/mitigate the problem.
Oh! Is it dreamhost? i’ve seen other people on these forums in the past have issues with dreamhost servers being unable to route to / from twitter servers. I don’t think it was ever discovered what the exact issues were. There are so many weird errors that can come from CDNs and networks. I still think manually putting in the twitter:image tags is a useful thing to do (that’s how they worked for me in the past), but for any network connectivity issues i think only people who work at twitter will be able to help - and even they may not have the info you need.
1 Like
Thanks Igor, I do appreciate all your suggestions and I’ll certainly feed back to Yoast about the twitter:image tags. The website is actually hosted on Flywheel’s UK-based servers, not at DreamHost; and the images are hosted on the same server, not on a CDN. Yes, if anyone from Twitter is reading this and has a suggestion, please do chirp in.
1 Like
domzy
#10
I am having the exact same issue. Did you ever get to the bottom of it? What’s strange is the TwitterBot is crawling the html pages just fine without timeouts, but seems to struggle with the images
TyEjdz
#11
+1 on this
Hello guys, I have exactly the same issue. Did you ever succeed in solving this?
Thank you very much for any hints.
+1 on this, I have also bumped into the same issue. Has anyone update on this?
Any update on this?
I’m having the same issue. VPS Hosted. No CDN, SSL configuration all fine. I’ve added the twitter:image tags as well and made sure all images are resized to a 2:1 aspect ratio. However it’s still intermittent.
1 Like
Is there a Content-Type header correctly set by the server?
Per the troubleshooting post, not really possible to suggest further without a URL.
