When someone shares your link on social, LinkedIn, Slack or WhatsApp, the preview is controlled by Open Graph tags. Without them, platforms guess — often badly.
The core four
<meta property="og:title" content="Your title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="A short description" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page" />The image is everything
Use a 1200×630px image with a safe margin, because platforms crop differently. For articles, og:type is article; otherwise website.
Twitter/X cards
X falls back to Open Graph, but explicit twitter:card tags give more control:
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />Common mistakes
- Missing og:image, so the preview is blank
- Relative image URLs (must be absolute)
- One generic image reused everywhere
- Description longer than about 200 characters
Generate and preview
Use the free Open Graph generator to produce the tags and check your share preview, and see the blog version for content sites.