How to Preview Social Media Link Cards Before Sharing
You hit "share" and your beautiful article shows up as a sad gray box with no image. Here's how to check — and fix — your link preview on every platform before anyone sees it.
⚡ Check yours now
Open the Social Card Preview tool, paste your URL, and see your X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and iMessage cards side by side — free.
What is a social card (link preview)?
When you share a link on X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, iMessage, or Slack, the platform doesn't just show a bare URL. It fetches your page, reads a handful of meta tags from the HTML <head>, and builds a rich preview card: image, title, description, site name. That card is what 90% of people actually look at — and click.
The tags come from two standards:
- Open Graph (
og:) — created by Facebook, now used almost everywhere - Twitter Cards (
twitter:) — X-specific, mostly justtwitter:cardthese days
Get them right and your links look professional. Get them wrong (or skip them) and platforms guess — usually badly.
The 5 tags you actually need
Forget the dozens of optional tags. These five cover 99% of cases:
<meta property="og:title" content="Your headline here">
<meta property="og:description" content="One or two compelling sentences.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yoursite.com/cover-1200x630.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://yoursite.com/your-page">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">- og:title — keep it under 60 characters so it doesn't get cut off
- og:description — 1–2 sentences, ~150 characters, written like ad copy
- og:image — absolute
https://URL, 1200×630px, under 1 MB
How each platform renders your card
X (Twitter)
Two flavors: summary_large_image (big image on top, title + description below — use this) and summary (small square thumbnail on the left). Large cards get dramatically more engagement. X crops images to roughly 2:1.
Image on top, then a light-gray box with your domain in small caps, bold title, and description. Facebook is strict about the 1.91:1 ratio and caches aggressively — after fixing tags, you must re-scrape with the Sharing Debugger.
Similar to Facebook but cleaner: image, bold title, domain. LinkedIn's crawler is slow — allow up to 24 hours for tag changes to reflect, and use the Post Inspector to force a refresh.
iMessage / WhatsApp / Slack
Compact cards: small image, title, short description, domain. These apps cache per-device, so test on a fresh chat. WhatsApp requires the image to be under 300 KB for reliable previews.
Fixing the 4 most common problems
1. No image shows up
Checklist: does og:image exist? Is the URL absolute (starts with https://)? Is the image at least 200×200px? Can the platform's crawler actually reach it (not blocked by login or robots.txt)? Nine times out of ten, it's a relative URL.
2. Wrong / old image
Platform cache. Facebook: Sharing Debugger → "Scrape Again". X: Card Validator. LinkedIn: Post Inspector. For stubborn cases, add a version query string (?v=2) to the image URL.
3. Title or description truncated
Every platform cuts text at different lengths. Front-load the important words: keep titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 150.
4. Image looks blurry or cropped weirdly
You're below 1200×630 or the focal point is near an edge. Design social images at exactly 1200×630 with safe margins, and export at 2x if text must stay crisp.
Designing a card image people click
- Big, readable headline on the image itself (many users never read the text below)
- One focal visual — product, face, or bold graphic. Avoid busy collages.
- Brand color band or logo in a corner for recognition in the feed
- Contrast: test at thumbnail size — if it's unreadable small, redesign
- Need the image smaller first? Run it through our Image Compressor to hit that 1 MB target without visible quality loss.
Frequently asked questions
How do I see what my link will look like when shared?
Why is my link preview showing the wrong image?
What is the best image size for link previews?
Do I need Twitter Card tags too?
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">. X falls back to your Open Graph tags for everything else, so you don't need to duplicate title, description, or image.