How to Preview How Your Link Looks When Shared

The card that appears when a link is shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or in a Slack or WhatsApp message isn't generated live from the page — it's built from a small set of meta tags in the page's HTML, called Open Graph tags. Get them wrong or leave them missing, and the preview can show a blank image, the wrong title, or nothing at all.

The tags that control the preview

<meta property="og:title" content="Your Page Title">
<meta property="og:description" content="A short, clear summary.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/preview.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page">

Twitter/X uses its own similar set of twitter: tags, which fall back to the Open Graph tags if the Twitter-specific ones aren't present — but it's safer to set both explicitly rather than rely on fallback behavior.

Checking your tags before you share

1. Paste your page's HTML or URL into Open Graph Preview to see exactly how the card will render on major platforms.
2. Confirm the image is the right dimensions — 1200 x 630px is the safe standard size that displays well across Facebook, LinkedIn, and X without awkward cropping.
3. Check the title and description aren't getting cut off — each platform truncates at a slightly different length.

Why a shared link sometimes shows an old preview

Most platforms cache a link's preview the first time it's shared, and don't automatically re-check it after that — so if you fix your tags after a link has already been shared once, the old cached preview can keep showing for a while. Most platforms have a manual "scrape again" or cache-refresh tool in their developer settings for exactly this situation.