Open Graph Preview

What Open Graph does

When someone pastes your link into Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Slack or X, the app fetches the page and looks for og: tags to build a preview card. Without them it guesses — usually badly, picking the first image it finds and the first paragraph of boilerplate. With them, you decide what people see.

The tags that matter

• og:title — around 60 characters before it is cut
• og:description — around 110 characters in most apps
• og:image — 1200 × 630 px, an absolute URL, under about 5 MB
• og:url — the canonical address of the page
• twitter:card — summary_large_image for a big picture, summary for a small one

How to use the preview

1. Fill in the fields and watch the three cards update as you type.
2. Or paste an existing <head> and press "Read the pasted tags" to load what a page already has.
3. Copy the tags into the <head> of your page.

Why the preview sometimes does not update

• Facebook and LinkedIn cache the card. Use Facebook's Sharing Debugger or LinkedIn's Post Inspector to force a re-fetch.
• WhatsApp caches too, and only reads the first part of the page — put the tags near the top of the head.
• The image must be reachable without a login and must not be blocked by robots.txt.
• A page rendered entirely by JavaScript may show nothing, since most crawlers read the raw HTML only.

Image advice

• 1200 × 630 is the safe size. WhatsApp crops to about 2:1, so keep anything important away from the edges.
• Put the words in the image large — the card is often seen at thumbnail size on a phone.
• Use an absolute https:// address. Relative paths are ignored by every platform.

Frequently asked questions

What size should an Open Graph image be?

1200 × 630 pixels, which is the 1.91:1 ratio Facebook and LinkedIn use. WhatsApp crops nearer to 2:1, so keep the important part in the middle.

Why does Facebook show an old image for my link?

It caches the preview. Run the URL through Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and press "Scrape Again" to make it fetch the new tags.

Do I need separate Twitter tags?

Only twitter:card, and twitter:site if you want your handle shown. X falls back to the Open Graph title, description and image for everything else.