Add setting to disable Optimole URL rewriting for social meta tags (og:image / twitter:image)

Open
  • Is something wrong?
#1,178 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Maintainers usually reply within 1 day

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
54/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
php, wordpress
Domain
backend

Research direction

Start by locating the settings registration and the front-end HTML parser or URL replacement logic in the Optimole WordPress plugin. Trace how it handles og:image, og:image:secure_url, and twitter:image, then identify the existing settings and tests for exclusions. Done means a dashboard toggle preserves the original URLs when enabled and compatibility is checked with the listed SEO plugins.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

customer report feature-request-triage

Impact: 75 · Confidence: 95 · Complexity: 40

Description

Problem

Optimole automatically rewrites image URLs inside page head social meta tags (og:image, og:image:secure_url, twitter:image) to Optimole CDN URLs. This can cause social media crawlers (such as Facebook Sharing Debugger, X/Twitter, LinkedIn) to fail to render link preview cards properly. Currently, site owners must add custom PHP filter code (optml_url_post_process) or manually exclude individual image filenames via Exclusions settings to prevent meta tag rewriting.

Desired Behavior

Provide an option in the Optimole WordPress plugin settings (e.g. under Advanced > Exclusions or General settings) to prevent Optimole from rewriting URLs inside social meta tags (og:image and twitter:image) across the site.

Acceptance Criteria
  • Add a toggle setting in the WordPress plugin dashboard under Settings (e.g. "Disable URL replacement in social meta tags").
  • When enabled, Optimole's front-end HTML parser/replacement logic bypasses <meta> tags with property="og:image", property="og:image:secure_url", and name="twitter:image", leaving original media URLs intact.
  • Verify compatibility with popular SEO plugins (Rank Math, Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, SEOPress).

Customer Context

The customer (Douglas, a pro user running a content website) experienced broken Facebook link previews for articles because Optimole rewrote og:image tags to Optimole CDN URLs. The only available workaround in the plugin UI was adding per-image filename exclusions, which is unmaintainable for new articles. The customer requested a dashboard setting or global rule to stop Optimole from rewriting social meta tags in the page head.

Root Cause Analysis

The customer's underlying problem is that social network crawlers (Facebook, Twitter/X, etc.) require standard, un-processed image URLs in Open Graph (og:image) and Twitter Card (twitter:image) HTML meta tags. Optimole's HTML post-processing parser automatically rewrites all image URLs on the page—including those inside head meta tags—to CDN URLs. When social platforms scrape the page, CDN URL parameters or format negotiations can prevent link previews from generating correctly. The plugin currently lacks a user-configurable setting or exclusion rule to preserve original URLs specifically within head meta tags site-wide, forcing users to rely on manual PHP snippets (optml_url_post_process) or tedious per-file exclusions.

Reasoning

The customer is reporting that Optimole automatically rewrites image URLs in Open Graph and Twitter Card social meta tags (, ) to Optimole CDN URLs. When social crawlers (like Facebook) fetch these rewritten URLs, previews can fail or display incorrectly. Currently, there is no setting in the Optimole WordPress plugin dashboard or cloud interface to disable social meta tag URL rewriting. The support agent confirmed this gap ("there isn't a dashboard setting yet to stop Optimole rewriting og:image/twitter:image") and provided a PHP snippet filter workaround. Exclude rules currently require per-image exclusions by filename, which is not scalable for site owners publishing new content continuously. While the customer initially asked if AVIF was forced, the core problem is the lack of a site-wide toggle or rule in Optimole settings to disable social meta tag rewriting. Root cause analysis confirms this is a genuine missing product feature/toggle in the Optimole WordPress plugin (Codeinwp/optimole-wp).

Source: HelpScout #3478424614
Generated by feature-request-triage workflow (ID: feature-request-triage_6acac3cfcf3413.17158397)

Dominant language
PHP
Stars
74
Forks
14
Avg merge
1d 20h
Merged PRs (30d)
39

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from Codeinwp/optimole-wp

All issues in Codeinwp/optimole-wp

Similar issues

More PHP issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.