Social Share Preview

How it works

What we check

• og:image (share image) — Checks for an Open Graph image — the single biggest factor in how your link looks in a feed. Without it, your link shares as a tiny, text-only card. The recommended size is 1200×630 pixels (a 1.91:1 ratio), at least 200×200, under ~5 MB.
• og:title — Reads the title platforms show on the card. If it's missing, most platforms fall back to your <title> tag — usable, but you lose the chance to write a punchier, share-optimized headline.
• og:description — Reads the one or two lines of description under the card title. Missing it means platforms guess from page text or show nothing. Roughly 2–4 lines (~200 characters) renders before it's cut off.
• twitter:card type — Checks the Twitter/X card type. 'summary_large_image' produces the big, edge-to-edge image card; plain 'summary' produces a small thumbnail. We flag a missing card type so you don't default to the smaller layout.
• twitter:image — Checks for an X-specific image. If it's absent, X falls back to your og:image — which is fine, but a dedicated twitter:image lets you crop differently for the card's aspect ratio.
• og:type — Reports the content type (article, website, product, etc.). It defaults to 'website' when unset; setting 'article' on blog posts enables richer treatment on some platforms.
• Tags in source vs. browser view — Reads the tags straight from the HTML a crawler receives — not from JavaScript that may add them later — so it catches the common case where tags appear in your browser but not to the social scraper.

Common issues we catch

• No og:image — link shares with no picture — By far the most damaging issue. A link with no Open Graph image shares as a plain text card that's easy to scroll past, slashing click-through. Add a 1200×630 image and your link suddenly looks like a real, clickable post.
• Image too small or wrong aspect ratio — Images under 200×200 may be ignored entirely, and anything far from the 1.91:1 ratio gets awkwardly cropped — heads cut off, text clipped. Design the share image at a true 1200×630 so it renders edge to edge.
• Relative image URL instead of absolute — Social scrapers need an absolute URL like https://example.com/share.jpg. A relative path such as /images/share.jpg often fails to resolve, so the platform finds no image even though one exists on the page.
• Tags injected by JavaScript — Open Graph and Twitter tags added by client-side JavaScript may be invisible to social scrapers, which typically read the raw HTML and don't fully run JS. Your browser shows the card; the platform sees nothing. Render these tags server-side.
• Stale cached preview after an update — Facebook, LinkedIn and X cache the scraped card for days. After you change the image or title, the old card keeps showing until you re-scrape the URL in the platform's debugger (or the cache naturally expires).
• Twitter card defaulting to the small thumbnail — Without twitter:card set to 'summary_large_image', X shows a small square thumbnail beside the text instead of the large banner image. One missing tag is the difference between a prominent card and a tiny icon.
• og:url or canonical mismatch — If og:url points to a different address than the one being shared, platforms may scrape and cache the wrong page's preview, so the card shows a title and image from somewhere else on your site.

Where this matters

• Facebook — Reads Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url). Facebook's Sharing Debugger is the canonical place to see exactly what it scraped and to force a fresh re-scrape after you fix tags.
• LinkedIn — Also relies on Open Graph tags and caches them hard. Use the LinkedIn Post Inspector to clear LinkedIn's cache; without it, your updated image can take a long time to appear.
• X (Twitter) — Reads twitter: tags first, then falls back to Open Graph. 'summary_large_image' gives the big banner card; without a card type you get the small thumbnail layout.
• Slack, Discord, WhatsApp & iMessage — Messaging apps generate link unfurls from the same Open Graph tags. Get og:title, og:description and og:image right and your link previews cleanly across all of them — no per-app work.
• Pinterest & WordPress / Shopify share plugins — Pinterest reads og:image (and supports its own rich-pin tags), while SEO and social plugins on WordPress and Shopify write these tags for you — sometimes leaving the image blank by default, which this tool catches.