🧠 What I Learned Today: Fixing LinkedIn's Cached OG Image Like a Pro!
Hey, I'm Ayush Hardeniya (aka Ayush Sharma) 👋 An engineering student who treats every coding challenge like a 🎮 new level to conquer. Through daily reflections, real-world problems, and code breakdowns, I document my journey --- not just to grow, but to help others grow with me. Because honestly... I don’t code, I play it. 🔥
Ever pushed a shiny new Open Graph (OG) image on your website, shared it on LinkedIn... and saw the old version still pop up?
Yep - same here. Here's how I fixed it in less than 10 minutes, and what I learned in the process.
🚩 Problem
I had just updated the OG image on my personal website. But when I tried sharing the link on LinkedIn, it still showed the previous version of the image.
At first, I thought maybe I made a mistake while uploading...
🖼️ [Screenshot: Old OG image being shown on LinkedIn]
🕵️♂️ Investigating via LinkedIn Post Inspector
I headed to LinkedIn Post Inspector to see what was being cached.
Surprisingly, it showed the correct updated OG image - which meant LinkedIn's backend had already crawled and updated the image.
🧩 [Screenshot: Post Inspector showing the updated OG image correctly]
🛠️ Solution: Cache Busting with [ ?v=2 ]
Turns out, LinkedIn aggressively caches images, even after you update them.
🔧 The Fix? A simple query string:
<meta property="og:image" content="https://ayushhardeniya.site/assets/website-pw-1.png?v=2">
Just by adding ?v=2 to the image URL, LinkedIn thinks it's a new resource.
I redeployed my website with the updated tag.
🧪 [Screenshot: Code editor showing updated OG tag with ?v=2]
✅ The Result: Success!
Went back to Post Inspector, ran the URL again, and... bam! The updated OG image finally showed up.
🎉 [Screenshot: LinkedIn showing the updated image after purging]
📚 What I Learned
LinkedIn aggressively caches OG images (more than expected).
Adding a simple
?v=2or any version number is a clean way to bust cache.Tools like LinkedIn Post Inspector are gold for debugging social previews.
Don’t forget to redeploy your site after editing meta tags.
💬 Final Thought
Small fixes like these often seem trivial, but the clarity they bring to your digital identity is huge.
It was a 10-minute fix, but I enjoyed learning something new.
~Ayush Hardeniya
