WP-Thumbnail

WP-Thumbnail is a simple and neat WordPress Plugin that not only allows you to use a short-code to generate dynamic
screenshot of webpages in your posts but also takes a realtime snapshot of the served webpage and saves a link to it
on the page itself that too without burdening the servers. This helps in optimizing search results on Google by adding
a thumbnail to the left of the search result snippet and makes shared posts more attractive, with a relevant thumbnails,
on Social Sites like Facebook.

For more information, check out wp-thumbnail.robocasters.com.

Features include:

• Short-Code – The plugin has a shortcode that enables you to add dynamic screenshots of webpages to your post.
• Meta Thumbnail – It uses meta name thumbnail and adds the live screenshot in it for being displayed as a thumbnail in Google Searches.
• PageMaps – PageMaps is a structured data format that provides Google with information about the data on a page. It enables website creators to embed data and notes in webpages.
• Facebook OG:Image – It sets image with content og:image to the top priority for being used as a Facebook Post thumbnail.
• WP-Thumbnail Class – It adds a WP-Thumbnail class that helps image to be used for all other sharing purposes.

This section describes how to install the plugin and get it working.

1. Upload wp-thumbnail.zip to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory or directly use the WordPress upload feature.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Click on the ‘Settings’ link.
4. Go through the documentation once.
5. You know what you have to do.

Why the shortcode is not working and refreshing?

It works in all cases. The possible problem is that you are not using ‘http’ or ‘https’ protocols.

Why there is no thumbnail on Google Searches?

The Google bots take sometime to refresh the contents. I depends on your site status. I might take a day or a month.

Why I shows-up generating the preview image on Facebook?

I may happen sometime because Facebook script is delicate and ‘sometimes’ time-out before the rendering (seen on slow connections).

1. 

   The First slide shows the admin page for the plugin a link to which is added on the 'Installed Plugin' page and the main sidebar. On the left pane of the page it shown how to use the shortcode. On the right pane you get to have some important links.

2. 

   The Second slide shows an example of the shortcode used on my blog to generate the dynamic screenshot of my homepage. The image shows up almost immediately and even if it doesn't the headache is not yours it will automatically refresh the page.

3. 

   The Third slide shows the raw format of the previous post, in second slide. Simple and easy to understand the shortcode has 5 attributes and the defaults of every boolean is true. One important thing to note is - you must add the http or https protocols to the url.

1.1

• Fixed the Facebook thumbnail problem, now not only you can use the dynamic webshot but can also use other images tagged to the webpage.