You paste your link into WhatsApp, Slack or LinkedIn and get… a naked blue URL. No image, no headline. Meanwhile every competitor's link renders as a rich card with a picture.
That difference is four meta tags, and it directly affects how many people click.
The tags you actually need
Inside <head>:
<meta property="og:title" content="Your headline">
<meta property="og:description" content="One compelling sentence.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yourdomain.com/preview.png">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://yourdomain.com/page">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">And for X/Twitter's larger card:
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">Note that Open Graph uses property= while Twitter tags use name=. Getting this backwards is a classic silent failure — the tag looks right and is ignored.
The five reasons previews break
1. A relative image URL
The most common cause by a distance. content="/images/preview.png" will not work. Scrapers require an absolute URL including the protocol: https://yourdomain.com/images/preview.png.
2. The platform cached an old version
Facebook, LinkedIn and X each cache aggressively — sometimes for weeks. If you added the tags after first sharing the link, the old empty result is stuck. Force a refresh with the platform debuggers (Facebook Sharing Debugger, LinkedIn Post Inspector, X Card Validator).
3. The image is blocked or too large
If your image sits behind authentication, is disallowed in robots.txt, or is enormous, scrapers give up. Keep it publicly accessible and reasonably sized.
4. Wrong dimensions
Use 1200×630. Very small images get rejected outright; odd aspect ratios get cropped unpredictably. Declaring dimensions helps platforms render without re-fetching:
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630">5. Tags injected by JavaScript
Most social scrapers do not execute JavaScript. If your framework adds Open Graph tags client-side, scrapers see an empty head. The tags must be in the server-rendered HTML.
Why this is worth an hour of your time
Open Graph tags are not a ranking factor — no direct SEO benefit at all. The return is entirely in click-through: a link with an image, headline and description occupies dramatically more visual space in a feed or chat than a bare URL, and gets acted on far more often.
For anything you promote in newsletters, communities or social posts, this is one of the highest-leverage hours available.
Test before you share
Our Open Graph checker reports which tags are present, which are missing, and whether your image URL is absolute — before you post the link somewhere it'll be cached badly.