Fix a broken social link preview

← Back to Social Preview Checker

A shared link with no image, the wrong image, or no title almost always comes down to one of five things. Check them in this order -- each one can hide the next.

1. Make og:image an absolute URL

The Open Graph protocol (ogp.me) requires og:image to be an absolute URL, not a path relative to the page. A tag like <meta property="og:image" content="/images/preview.png"> is invalid per spec — some crawlers resolve it against the page URL anyway, others do not, so a relative URL is the single most common cause of an image silently failing to appear.

2. The fallback chain: twitter:* falls back to og:*

You don't need separate twitter:image, twitter:title, and twitter:description tags. X/Twitter's card renderer falls back to the matching og:* tag when its own is absent. What you do need is an explicit twitter:card value (summary or summary_large_image) — whether X falls back to plain Open Graph tags with no twitter:card at all is undocumented and has changed before, so set it explicitly rather than relying on that.

3. Meet the platform's documented minimum image size

Below the hard minimum, an image is commonly not rendered at all rather than shown smaller. Check your actual served file's pixel dimensions, not the source image you started from — a build step or CDN resize can quietly shrink it below the line. This checker fetches the real bytes and reads the dimensions out of the file header rather than trusting an og:image:width tag, which can go stale independently of the file it describes.

4. Check for a duplicated tag from a CMS or SEO plugin

Many platforms (WordPress SEO plugins especially) inject their own og:title/og:image tags, which can collide with a hand-written tag already in the template. Most crawlers use the first matching tag in document order, but which one that is depends on which system rendered its tag first in the final HTML — view the page's actual source (not the CMS editor) to see which value wins.

5. Force a re-fetch on the platform you're testing

Every major platform caches a link's preview aggressively and will keep showing a stale (or blank) result after you fix the tags until it re-crawls the URL. Use that platform's own preview-refresh tool where one exists before concluding your fix did not work — this checker reads the tags and image as they are right now, not what a platform's cache currently shows a visitor.