How to debug Twitter cards or Facebook shares cache

This is a problem most web developers encountered at some point. You are making changes to the way your site handle Twitter cards or Facebook shares, but Facebook and Twitter keep on pulling out the same information as before. This issue is due to the cache that both apps have in place in order to be able to handle so much data all the time.

So, how do you solve this? Luckily, both of the Internet giants have simple solutions in place to make your life and debugging easier.

Debugging Facebook shares cache

For Facebook, you’ll need to go to the official debug tool that Facebook made available for developers.

Just enter your URL and hit the debug button, you’ll get plenty of information about what’s in Facebook’s cache and the meta data Facebook is using. If it’s not right, you can try hitting the refresh button to get the right data in Facebook’s cache, or at least check if the data you prepared for Facebook is right.

At the bottom, you can always see a preview that show you what your updates will look like. It should look something like this.

Debugging Twitter cards cache

To update the cache of Twitter cards, it’s even easier. Just go to the Card Validator provided by Twitter, and enter your URL. You’ll quickly get a preview that will let you know whether the Twitter Cards are set up right on your website, otherwise you’ll have some debugging to do. There is also a useful log provided each time you test a URL: