Social Media Preview

What the social media preview tool does

When someone shares your link, the social network does not show your page. It shows a card built from a handful of meta tags: og:title, og:description, og:image and a few Twitter Card equivalents. If those tags are missing or wrong, the network guesses, and the guess is usually a truncated page title with no image. This tool fetches the page the same way a crawler would, reads every Open Graph and Twitter tag plus the title, meta description and canonical link, and renders three cards that mimic Facebook, X and LinkedIn. Below the cards it lists the specific problems it found, from a missing image to a description that will be cut off.

How to use it

• Enter the full URL of the page, including https. Bare domains work too.
• Look at the three previews. Facebook and LinkedIn use the Open Graph tags; X prefers Twitter Card tags and falls back to Open Graph.
• Read the warnings. Items marked fix will visibly break the card, improve items make it better, and notes are best practice.
• Update your tags. Our meta tag generator writes a complete set you can paste into the head of the page, and the meta tag analyzer audits the wider SEO tags.
• After publishing, run the check again, then use the network debug tools (Facebook Sharing Debugger, LinkedIn Post Inspector) to clear their cache.

What makes a good share card

The image matters most. Use a 1200 by 630 pixel JPG or PNG under 1 MB, referenced with an absolute https URL, and include og:image:width and og:image:height so Facebook can render it on the very first share instead of after the first crawl. Keep og:title under about 60 characters so it is not truncated, and write it for people rather than search engines. Give og:description two short sentences, under 200 characters, that say why someone should click. Set twitter:card to summary_large_image so X shows the picture full width instead of a thumbnail. Add og:url pointing to the canonical address so share counts are not split across variants, og:type as website or article, and og:site_name so LinkedIn and messaging apps can label the source.

Why it matters

Shared links with a large image get roughly two to three times the engagement of text only links, and the same applies in WhatsApp, Slack, iMessage and email clients that render previews from the same tags. A broken card also looks careless, which erodes trust before the visitor has even arrived. Because networks cache the result of their first crawl, it is worth getting the tags right before a launch or campaign rather than fixing them afterwards. Digzy Technology sets up per page Open Graph and Twitter tags, including generated share images, as part of every website build, and this tool is how we check the result.