How to make your facebook cover image crisp

UPDATE:

Facebook is always evolving. The dimensions below in my original article no longer give the best results. I have since changed my cover image dimensions to 851x477 and have achieved clear crisp text and imagery. In addition, the coverage image also looks great on mobile devices including tablets. The height is 477px so it looks great on tablets. You'll notice it's a bit tall for your desktop, but you can drag and drop to align for best results.

Here is the Faecbook coverage page: www.facebook.com/hdelmorephotographer

If you are like me, I have struggled with Facebook's compression making my images look blurry and fuzzy. It is especially obvious when adding text to your Facebook cover image. I researched best practices and was told by several online sources to make sure my cover image fit perfectly, I needed to size it to 851 x 315 pixels 72 DPI. When I did that, and saved it as a .jpg and/or .png the result looked like this:

Not very professional! The "www" and ".ca" are very blurry! Initially I thought the colours between the text and the image were too close and needed more contrast. So I changed the text to white. Same problem.

Then I thought about how many new apps and programs are gearing themselves towards this new retina display. And as such, they require a larger image size.

Using this retina display concept, I resized my Facebook cover image to: 1702 x 630 px! And magic!

See not only how clear the image is, but also how crisp the text appears. Even the small ultra thin text is clear. I saved my 1702 x 630 px 72 DPI cover as .png however, it will still appear this crisp as a jpg.

* For aesthetic purposes I decided to make the image of the model larger in my 1702 x 630 px layout. I just changed my mind and thought it looked better. It changes nothing in terms of quality in Facebook.