See How Your Link Looks When Shared
A link that shows up blank, cropped, or with the wrong image gets scrolled past — and most platforms cache that broken first impression for days. Paste a URL to preview the exact card X, Facebook and LinkedIn will render, and catch a missing og:image or wrong card type before you post.
The four tags that make or break a social preview
Every platform builds its card from a handful of Open Graph and Twitter Card tags in your page's <head>. This tool reads them the way a crawler does and flags exactly which one is sabotaging your preview.
og:image — present, absolute, right size
The preview image every platform builds the card around. It must be an absolute https:// URL — a relative path like /og.png silently fails on every platform — and 1200×630 (1.91:1) renders full-width everywhere without cropping.
og:title & og:description
The headline and text of your card. Without them, platforms fall back to your <title> tag or scrape arbitrary page text — which is how a marketing page ends up sharing with its cookie-banner copy as the description.
twitter:card type
Decides whether X renders your link as a full-width image card (summary_large_image) or a small square thumbnail (summary). It's a one-line tag, and it's the single most common reason a preview looks great on Facebook but tiny on X.
og:url & og:image dimensions
og:url canonicalises shares so tracking parameters don't split your preview across variants. Declared og:image:width and og:image:height let Facebook render the large card on the very first share, instead of a small one until it re-fetches.
Auditing search-facing tags too — title length, meta description, keywords? Run the full meta tag checker →
Same tags, different cards: platform by platform
The tags are a shared standard, but every platform interprets them with its own rules, sizes and caching. Here's what actually differs — and why a link can look perfect on one platform and broken on another.
X (Twitter)
X reads its own twitter:* tags first and falls back to Open Graph for anything missing. The make-or-break tag is twitter:card: "summary_large_image" gets you the full-width card, while a missing tag or "summary" collapses it to a small square thumbnail beside the text. On large cards X overlays your domain on the image itself and gives the title one line — front-load it, because your description may not be shown at all.
Facebook uses Open Graph exclusively and ignores twitter:* tags. It's strict about image size: below roughly 600×315 the image drops to a small square beside the text instead of the full-width card, and 1200×630 is the sweet spot. One quirk worth knowing: on the very first share of a URL, Facebook may render the small card if og:image:width and og:image:height aren't declared, because it hasn't downloaded the image yet. Facebook also caches the first crawl — fixes to your tags won't appear until you force a re-scrape.
LinkedIn also reads only Open Graph and renders a large card at 1.91:1 when your og:image is big enough. Its defining trait is aggressive caching: the first preview it builds for a URL sticks for about a week, so if the tags were broken when the first person shared your link, everyone sees the broken card until the cache expires or you refresh it via LinkedIn's Post Inspector. Titles get about 70 characters before truncation, and the description is often hidden entirely in the feed.
Slack & Discord
Both unfurl links from Open Graph tags, so the same og:image, og:title and og:description drive your previews in team chat too. Slack shows a compact card — small thumbnail or large image depending on the image's dimensions — and also displays og:site_name above the title. Discord builds its embed from Open Graph plus one extra: a theme-color meta tag sets the accent stripe on the embed's left edge. Discord respects twitter:card as well, so "summary_large_image" widens the embed image the same way it does on X.
Already shared the link and stuck with a stale card? How to force a preview refresh on every platform →
Social preview questions, answered
Why does my link show a small thumbnail instead of a large card on X?
Your page is missing the twitter:card meta tag, or it's set to "summary". X only renders the full-width image card when it finds twitter:card set to "summary_large_image" — everything else falls back to the small square thumbnail. It's one line: <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />. Your existing og:image, og:title and og:description carry over, so that single tag is usually the whole fix.
Does Discord or Slack use Open Graph tags?
Yes — both build their link previews from the same og:image, og:title and og:description tags as the big social networks, so fixing your Open Graph tags fixes team chat too. Discord additionally reads a theme-color meta tag to color the embed's accent stripe, and respects twitter:card for the large-image layout. Slack shows og:site_name above the title and sizes the card based on your image's dimensions.
How do I force Facebook to refresh my link preview?
Run the URL through Facebook's Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) and click "Scrape Again". Facebook re-fetches your page immediately and replaces the cached preview. This matters because Facebook caches the card from the first time anyone shares a URL — so after fixing your tags, the old broken preview keeps appearing until you force this re-scrape.
Why does my preview work on Facebook but not on WhatsApp?
WhatsApp reads the same Open Graph tags but enforces stricter limits: it tends to skip og:image files over a few hundred KB, wants plain JPG or PNG (no SVG), and requires the image over https. It also caches previews longer and less predictably than any other platform. Compress the image under ~300 KB, confirm the URL is absolute https, then share the link with a throwaway query parameter (?v=2) to bypass WhatsApp's cache.
Can I see how my link will look before I post it?
Yes — that's what this page does. Paste your URL above and it fetches the page the same way a social crawler does (initial HTML, no JavaScript), then renders the actual X, Facebook and LinkedIn cards from the tags it finds. Checking before the first share matters more than it seems: most platforms cache whatever card they build on first contact, so a broken first impression sticks around for days.
Preview looks broken and you'd rather not hand-write the fix? Generate a complete set of OG tags →