Sharing on WhatsApp problem

  • Resolved georgcantor

    (@georgcantor)


    2 years, 2 months ago

    I’m having a problem with sharing on whatsapp. It’s not a very uncommon issue. I have read all the threads related to this in the forum and others.

    I know that other plugins such as caching and speed optimization can cause trouble. I know about the facebook debugger tool.

    I have gotten to a situation where my production site being duplicated as a staging environment with exactly the same plugins and settings accomplishes in showing in whatsapp an image thumbnail preview, but the same page on the production website does not. Compare:

    https://www.assafmanor.co.il

    and

    https://test.assafmanor.co.il

    This is very weird indeed.

    Just for the fun of it I tried disabling autoptimize and wp rocket I have installed on my site, from the production website, although it works fine with them of the staging environment – it didn’t work. Moreover – when I reactivated the plugins the facebook debugger tool started saying:

    “Provided og:image URL,?https://www.assafmanor.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/proofs-cover1.jpg?could not be processed as an image because it has an invalid content type”

    Which wasn’t the case before disabled them. I of course tried clearing the cache of the plugins and in the server. I am on cloudways so with the help of the support we thought maybe it’s a problem with the CDN; as the staging is not connected to cloudflare enterprise – that might be the culprit. So we disabled Cloudflare Enterprise. That didn’t work.

    I am desperate – what could possibly be the problem?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Support devnihil

    (@devnihil)

    @georgcantor We’re sorry to hear you are experiencing this issue on your site.

    I tested both the staging and live URL in the WhatsApp debug application, and for me, neither preview image was appearing for me (see image here).

    I tried both links in a different debug utility and noticed that it looked like the debug utility was finding valid URLs for the preview image links, but that something was preventing them from loading. Upon further inspection and according to the error I received, it looks like you may have a feature that prevents image hotlinking on your site (see image here).

    Image hotlinking being disabled is typically configured in your hosting control panel (such as cPanel or something similar) and it’s purpose is to prevent bandwidth leeching from a site. When enabled it prevents other sites from loading images that are hosted on your site. So for example if I made an html page but for the image sources I used absolute URLs to images on your site, it would prevent them from loading. Can you please check in your hosting control panel to see whether you have image hotlinking disabled? If you don’t see a way to enable/disable it, it’s possible it’s enabled at a server level or might require contacting your hosting provider to disable it.

    Plugin Support Jose Varghese

    (@josevarghese)

    This thread was marked resolved due to a lack of activity by the original poster, but the original poster is always welcome to re-open the topic. Please read this post before opening a new request.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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