The Social Preview tool shows you exactly how your page will appear when shared on Facebook, Twitter/X and LinkedIn — before you share it. Find and fix appearance issues before your links go live.
The Social Preview tool fetches your page, extracts Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, validates the image URL and dimensions, and renders a preview showing how the link card will appear on each major platform. It flags issues including missing tags, invalid image URLs, wrong image dimensions and missing required properties.
The ideal og:image is 1200 x 630 pixels. Images that are too small (under 600 x 315) may not render on some platforms. Square images (1:1 ratio) render differently than landscape images — design your OG image specifically for the 1.91:1 ratio.
If your robots.txt blocks Facebot or Twitterbot from crawling images, social platforms cannot fetch your og:image. Check your robots.txt allows access to your image directories.
Without a twitter:card meta tag, Twitter/X will not show a card preview — just a plain link. Add twitter:card set to "summary_large_image" for a large image card or "summary" for a small image card.
1200 × 630 is the right file to produce. What each platform then does with it varies, and that is what decides whether your image works or turns into a headless torso.
summary_large_image shows a landscape card; with plain summary it shows a small square thumbnail beside the text. Same file, cropped to a square. Anything at the left or right edge is gone.Platforms recompress heavily and downscale aggressively for mobile feeds. Text that is crisp in your design tool becomes a grey smear at thumbnail size — and a caption you cannot read is worse than no caption, because it occupies the space where a legible image could have been. If you use text: a handful of very large words, high contrast, dead centre. Not a sentence.
Most feeds are now dark for a substantial share of users. A logo or diagram with a transparent background — or a white background bleeding into a white card — will look broken for those people and fine for you. Give the image a solid background and check it against black.
The default in almost every CMS is one site-wide social image. It ships, previews render, nothing errors, and the problem is invisible: every link you ever share looks identical. The preview card tells the reader nothing about which page it is, so the image — the largest and most attention-grabbing element in the entire share — is doing no work at all.
The fix scales with effort available:
og-image-v2.png rather than overwriting og-image.png sidesteps both caches at once and is the fastest way to make a change actually appear.The obvious ones — missing tag, 404, wrong dimensions — are listed above. These are the ones that produce a blank preview on a page that looks perfect in a browser:
facebookexternalhit or LinkedInBot a challenge page or a 403. The scraper receives an interstitial, finds no Open Graph tags in it, and renders a bare link. Your browser sees the real page and you cannot reproduce the fault. This is now one of the most common causes of a broken preview and it is almost never diagnosed, because nobody thinks to check whether their own security is the problem.The definitive test: fetch your own page with curl and read the raw response. That is what the scraper sees. If the tags are not in that output — or if what comes back is a bot-challenge page — no amount of cache-clearing will help, because there was never anything to cache.
The instinct is to test by posting the link somewhere and looking at it. Do not: the platform caches whatever it scraped on that first attempt, so a broken preview posted once is a broken preview cached — and the post itself is now public and wrong.
curl the page. Are the tags in the raw HTML? Did you get a 200, or a bot challenge? If the tags are absent here, stop — it is a rendering or blocking problem, and every step below is wasted.og:image URL directly, in a private window. Does it load, anonymously, over HTTPS, with no referrer? This catches hotlink protection, auth, and stale CDN paths.Different platforms use different tag sets. Facebook and LinkedIn use Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image). Twitter/X uses Twitter Card tags (twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image) with Open Graph as a fallback. Each platform also has different image dimension preferences and caches metadata independently. The Social Preview tool shows the actual rendering for each platform.
Each platform has its own cache refresh tool. Facebook: use the Sharing Debugger at developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ and click 'Scrape Again'. LinkedIn: use the Post Inspector at linkedin.com/post-inspector/. Twitter/X: post the URL in a tweet and the card will update. Cache refresh typically takes a few minutes to propagate.
Common causes of broken social previews include: missing og:image tag, image URL returning 404 or being blocked by robots.txt, image dimensions below platform minimums (600x315px), image file size above platform limits (Facebook: 8MB), HTTPS certificate errors on the image URL, or the page returning an error status code. The Social Preview tool identifies which of these is causing the issue.
Two causes account for most of these. Bot protection — Cloudflare's bot-fighting modes, a WAF rule or a rate limiter — may be serving the scraper a challenge page or a 403, which contains no Open Graph tags, while your browser sees the real page. Or the tags are injected by JavaScript, which most social scrapers never execute; they parse the served HTML, so anything added after hydration does not exist to them. Fetch your own page with curl and read the raw response — that is exactly what the scraper sees.
Centre-weight it and assume a square crop from the middle. Facebook and LinkedIn show the landscape card as designed, but Twitter/X with a plain summary card shows a small square thumbnail, and WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack and Discord often render a compact square-ish image. Keep the subject and any text in the central square, treat the left and right thirds as expendable, use very few and very large words if any, and give the image a solid background so it does not break in dark mode.
It is a wasted asset rather than an error. Every link you share looks identical, so the largest and most attention-grabbing element of the preview tells the reader nothing about which page it is. At minimum use a distinct image per template; better, a real image for your top pages; best, generate them dynamically with the page title rendered onto a branded background, so every page has a card that says what it is.
Two caches are holding it: your CDN is serving the old file at that URL, and the social platform has cached its own copy of what it fetched. Publishing under a new filename — og-image-v2.png rather than overwriting og-image.png — sidesteps both at once and is the fastest way to make the change appear.
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