Open Graph Checker: Social Share Preview

What This Checks

Enter a URL and the checker reports the Open Graph properties a platform reads when it builds a link preview, plus the Twitter card equivalents where they differ. Open Graph originated at Facebook and is now read by nearly everything that unfurls a link, including Slack, LinkedIn, iMessage, WhatsApp, and Discord.

The four properties that matter are og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url. If they are absent, platforms fall back to guessing from the page, and the guess is usually your site name, a paragraph of navigation text, and either no image or your logo at the wrong aspect ratio.

Reading the Output

PROPERTY            VALUE
og:title            Project Management for Small Teams
og:description      A practical guide to picking tools
                    that a team of five will actually use.
og:image            https://acme.com/img/pm-guide.png
og:image:width      1200
og:image:height     630
og:url              https://acme.com/project-management/
og:type             article
twitter:card        summary_large_image

FINDINGS
  image ratio       1.91:1, correct for large card
  og:type           article, correct for this page
  twitter:image     absent, falls back to og:image, fine

Image dimensions are where most previews fail. The widely supported large-card format is 1200 by 630, a ratio of roughly 1.91 to 1. Supply a square logo and platforms either crop it badly or fall back to a small thumbnail beside the text, which looks like a broken link rather than a designed one. Declaring width and height explicitly also lets a platform reserve the space before the image loads.

og:type is small and consequential. Setting it to article on an article and website on a home page is correct. Leaving article on every page of a site, which is a common default from older themes, tells every platform that your pricing page is a piece of editorial.

Why Previews Break

Three causes account for most of it. The image is behind a login, a hotlink block, or a CDN rule, so the platform cannot fetch it. The URL is relative rather than absolute, which platforms do not resolve. Or the preview is simply cached: most platforms cache aggressively, so a fix made after a link has been shared will not appear until the cache expires or you force a refresh through that platform's own debugging tool.

The cache issue is worth knowing before you spend an hour debugging tags that were already correct.

Questions