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Troubleshooting LinkedIn Sharing Issues with AddToAny Share Buttons

24 threads Sep 10, 2025 Plugin → Addtoany share buttons

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If you've ever tried to share a post from your WordPress site to LinkedIn using the AddToAny Share Buttons plugin, you might have encountered a frustrating problem: the wrong title, a missing image, or even an error message. This is a common issue reported by users, but the root cause is almost never the AddToAny plugin itself.

This guide will explain why these LinkedIn sharing problems occur and provide the most effective steps to diagnose and fix them.

Why This Happens

When a share button is clicked, social networks like LinkedIn do not get the page's information directly from your website in that instant. Instead, they send a "crawler" or "bot" to your page's URL to scrape its data—specifically the Open Graph meta tags in your page's HTML code. These meta tags tell LinkedIn what title, description, and image to display in the share preview.

The AddToAny plugin provides the share button, but it is not responsible for generating these meta tags. Problems with the share preview are almost always due to one of the following:

  1. Missing or Incorrect Meta Tags: Your page lacks the proper Open Graph (og:) meta tags that LinkedIn needs.
  2. LinkedIn's Cache: LinkedIn caches (saves) the data from the first time it scraped your page. If you update your post's title or featured image later, LinkedIn may continue to show the old, cached data.
  3. Server Errors: If LinkedIn's crawler receives an error (like a 500 Internal Server Error) when it tries to access your page, it will fail to retrieve any data.
  4. Canonical URL Issues: If your page has a canonical URL tag that points to a different page, LinkedIn will scrape that other page instead.

How to Troubleshoot and Fix LinkedIn Sharing Issues

Follow these steps to identify and resolve the problem.

Step 1: Test Your URL with LinkedIn's Post Inspector

This is the single most important diagnostic tool. The 'AddToAny Share Buttons' team and other experts frequently recommend it.

  1. Go to the LinkedIn Post Inspector.
  2. Paste the full URL of the page you are trying to share.
  3. Click "Inspect."

The tool will show you exactly what data LinkedIn's crawler sees: the title, description, image, and canonical URL. If this information is wrong, your share preview will be wrong.

If the data is incorrect: The problem is with your meta tags, not the share button. You need to configure your SEO plugin (like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO) to output the correct Open Graph tags for your posts and pages.

If the data is correct but sharing still shows old data: LinkedIn's cache is the culprit. The Post Inspector tool has a button to force LinkedIn to "Scrape again" and update its cache. You may need to do this each time you update a post.

Step 2: Verify Your Open Graph Meta Tags

Since AddToAny does not generate meta tags, you need a dedicated SEO plugin. Popular choices include Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack. Ensure the plugin is properly configured to display Open Graph data. Key tags to check for are:

  • og:title
  • og:description
  • og:image
  • og:url (This should match the page's URL to avoid canonical issues)

Step 3: Check for Server Errors

If the LinkedIn Post Inspector shows an error or cannot fetch any data, your server might be blocking LinkedIn's crawler or returning an error code. Test your URL with other debugging tools to confirm:

If other tools also report errors, you will need to troubleshoot your server configuration or hosting environment.

Step 4: Be Patient

Unlike Facebook, which refreshes its cache quickly, LinkedIn can take up to a week to recognize changes made to a page after it was first shared. Using the Post Inspector to force a scrape is the best way to expedite this process.

Conclusion

When your LinkedIn share previews are broken, remember that the share button is just the messenger. The message itself—the title, image, and description—comes from your website's meta tags. By using the LinkedIn Post Inspector to see what LinkedIn sees, you can quickly identify whether the issue is with your meta tags or LinkedIn's cache and take the appropriate steps to fix it.

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