Well, it’s been done. Facebook no longer allows pages to edit link titles, descriptions or photos.

Facebook made the decision to limit link editing to combat fake news (but I really think it’s to make our lives harder).

If your organization uses WordPress, however, there’s a backend trick that allows you to edit how the link appears when shared on social media. It’s called Yoast SEO.

At Colorado State University, we use WordPress for SOURCE, our news website. I’m going to show step-by-step instructions on editing the link display in SOURCE. However, this trick only works if you have access to the WordPress website. If you don’t, I’m sorry and you should probably stop reading this blog because it will be of no use to you and will leave you frustrated.

1. Open the WordPress story you want to edit

2. Yoast SEO

If you cannot find this tool, you might need to talk to your web designer or developer about adding the tool to WordPress.

Make sure to click on the social network icon on the lefthand side to edit the Facebook and Twitter link title, description and image. Once you’ve edited the display, update or publish your story.

3. Debug your link

We’ve found that Facebook doesn’t automatically recognize the changes when we post our updated link.

If this happens to you, run your link through Facebook’s link scrubber. Sometimes, we have to scrub the link a few times before Facebook will recognize the changes. You’ll know when the link is ready to go when the display appears how you want it to (see below).

That’s it. A couple more steps, unfortunately. But hey, at least we can prevent some links from displaying hideously on Facebook.

Special thanks to our PR team and web team for helping us figure out how to even do this.