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Link Preview Checker — Test Open Graph and Twitter Card Tags Before You Share

Every time someone shares a URL on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), WhatsApp, Slack, or Discord, the platform fetches that page and generates a preview card — a visual summary showing a title, description, and image that appears in the feed or message thread. That preview card is the first thing people see before they decide whether to click. It's not controlled by the sharing platform's algorithm: it's entirely determined by specific HTML meta tags in your page's <head> section — Open Graph tags and Twitter Card tags. Get them right, and your content looks polished and professional wherever it's shared. Leave them out or misconfigure them, and your content appears with a broken image, a raw URL, or placeholder text that undermines trust and kills click-through rates.

This tool fetches a live URL, reads its meta tags, and renders approximate preview cards as they would appear on major platforms — so you can verify your tags are working correctly before your content goes out. Paste the URL, check the preview for each platform, and fix any issues in your page's HTML before publishing or sharing.

Open Graph Tags — The Foundation of Social Previews

Open Graph (og:) was developed by Facebook in 2010 as an open protocol for embedding structured metadata in web pages. It's now the standard format used for link previews across virtually every major platform — Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and many others all read Open Graph tags when generating link cards.

The four essential Open Graph tags every page should have:

og:title — The headline that appears in the preview card. This can be different from your HTML <title> tag, and often should be — your page title might include brand name suffixes for SEO, while your og:title can be more conversational and click-worthy for social sharing. Keep it under 60–70 characters to avoid truncation on most platforms.

og:description — The summary text shown beneath the title. This is your pitch to get people to click — 2–3 sentences maximum, ideally under 150 characters. It's not used for SEO (the meta description is separate), so optimize it for readability and engagement rather than keyword density.

og:image — The preview image URL. This is the most visually dominant element of the card and has the biggest impact on click-through rate. Must be an absolute URL starting with https:// — relative paths will not work when the platform's crawler fetches the image independently.

og:url — The canonical URL for the page. This helps platforms correctly identify which URL the card represents, especially when multiple URLs might serve the same content.

Additional useful tags: og:type (typically "website" for regular pages, "article" for blog posts — affects how some platforms handle the card), og:site_name (your site's name, displayed on some cards), and og:locale (language and region, e.g. en_US).

Twitter Card Tags — Separate Control for X (Twitter)

Twitter Card tags (twitter: prefix) give you specific control over how your content appears on X (formerly Twitter). While Twitter will fall back to Open Graph tags if Twitter Card tags are absent, using both gives you the ability to optimize separately for each platform.

The most important Twitter Card tag is twitter:card. This defines the card format: summary shows a small square thumbnail alongside the title and description; summary_large_image shows a large banner image above the title — significantly more visually impactful and higher-performing for content links. Without this tag, Twitter defaults to summary and shows only a small thumbnail regardless of what image you specify.

twitter:title and twitter:description work the same as their og: counterparts. twitter:image specifies the image for Twitter specifically. twitter:site is your Twitter username (with @) for brand attribution on the card.

Image Requirements and Dimensions for Social Previews

The preview image is what stops people mid-scroll. Getting the dimensions and format right matters:

Open Graph / Facebook / LinkedIn: Recommended size is 1200×630 pixels at a 1.91:1 aspect ratio. Facebook requires a minimum of 200×200 pixels to display any image; for large card display, the minimum is 600×315. LinkedIn uses the same Open Graph tags and similar dimensions. Images must be publicly accessible — no authentication, no geoblocking, no CDN restrictions that would block the platform's crawler.

Twitter summary_large_image: 1200×628 pixels recommended, with a minimum of 300×157. The image is cropped to a 2:1 ratio on most displays.

Format and size: JPG, PNG, GIF, and WebP are all supported. Keep file size under 8 MB (Facebook's limit); smaller is better for faster fetching by the platform crawler. SVG is generally not supported. Always use absolute HTTPS URLs — relative URLs and HTTP will fail on most platforms.

Why Preview Caching Causes Problems (and How to Fix It)

Social platforms cache link preview data aggressively. Facebook and LinkedIn may cache a preview for 24 hours or longer — which means if you update your meta tags or image after sharing a URL, the old preview continues to show for existing shares and any new shares of the same URL until the cache expires. This is a common source of frustration when launching or updating content.

To force a cache refresh: Facebook provides the Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) — paste your URL and click "Scrape Again" to force Facebook to re-fetch and update the cached preview. LinkedIn has the Post Inspector (linkedin.com/post-inspector/) that works the same way. For Twitter/X, there's no official cache refresh tool, but new shares after updating tags will typically pick up the new metadata within minutes. This checker tool always fetches live data, so it reflects your current meta tags even if the platforms still show older cached versions.

Frequently Asked Questions About Link Previews