Open Graph & Social Previews

When someone shares a link, the platform tries to build a preview card — a title, a description, an image. Left to guess, it picks whatever it can find, often badly. Open Graph tags let you specify exactly what appears.

Open Graph originated at Facebook but is now read by most platforms that render link previews — messaging apps, Slack, LinkedIn, and others. Adding it once covers most places a link can be shared.

A small number of extra tags control the card format on X specifically. If they are absent, the platform falls back to the Open Graph tags, so these are optional refinement rather than a requirement:

In a feed of text, the preview image is what stops the scroll. A few practical points:

• Use a wide landscape image. A 1200×630 pixel image is the widely-used convention and renders correctly in most places.
• Use an absolute URL. A relative path will not resolve — the platform fetching it is not on your domain.
• Keep important content away from the edges. Different platforms crop differently.
• Text in the image should be large. Previews are often displayed small.

Platforms cache previews aggressively. If you share a link, then fix the tags, the old preview will usually persist — sometimes for a long time. Most major platforms provide a debugging tool that fetches the page fresh and refreshes their cached copy.

The practical implication: get the tags right before a link is widely shared, rather than fixing them after. Recovering from a bad cached preview is more work than setting it correctly the first time.

For most pages, Open Graph tags can be generated from data you already have — the page title, the meta description, and a representative image. Hand-writing them per page is only worth it for pages you expect to be shared heavily. Having a reasonable site-wide default image, so that no link ever previews with nothing at all, matters more than perfecting each one.