My Website Preview Looks Wrong on Social Media
When you share your website link on Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, or in a text message, the preview that appears looks wrong. Maybe it shows the wrong image (or no image at all), a weird title, a missing description, or just an ugly plain link with no preview.
This matters more than you think. Social media previews are often someone's first impression of your business. If your link looks broken or unprofessional compared to other websites, people are far less likely to click it. It makes your site look amateur or suspicious.
The good news is that fixing this is relatively simple — your website just needs a few specific tags that tell social media platforms what image, title, and description to show.
Error Messages You Might See
Common Causes
- Missing Open Graph tags — Your website doesn't have the special HTML tags (called Open Graph tags) that Facebook and LinkedIn use to create previews
- Missing Twitter Card tags — Twitter/X uses its own set of tags for previews, and your site doesn't have them
- Image too small or wrong format — The preview image needs to be at least 1200x630 pixels. Smaller images get cropped or ignored
- Social media cached old version — You fixed the tags but Facebook/Twitter still show the old broken preview from their cache
- No image specified — Without a specified image, social platforms pick a random image from your page — often a tiny icon or the wrong photo
How to Fix It
- Add Open Graph tags to your pages — Add og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url meta tags to the head section of your HTML
- Add Twitter Card tags — Add twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description, and twitter:image meta tags
- Create a proper preview image — Design an image that's 1200x630 pixels showing your brand, product, or a relevant graphic
- Clear social media caches — Use Facebook's Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) and Twitter's Card Validator to refresh your previews
- Test every important page — Check the preview for your homepage, product pages, blog posts, and any page you'd commonly share
Real developers can help you.
Prakash Prajapati
I’m a Senior Python Developer specializing in building secure, scalable, and highly available systems. I work primarily with Python, Django, FastAPI, Docker, PostgreSQL, and modern AI tooling such as PydanticAI, focusing on clean architecture, strong design principles, and reliable DevOps practices. I enjoy solving complex engineering problems and designing systems that are maintainable, resilient, and built to scale.
PawelPloszaj
I'm fronted developer with 10+ years of experience with big projects. I have small backend background too
Dor Yaloz
SW engineer with 6+ years of experience,
I worked with React/Node/Python
did projects with React+Capacitor.js for ios
Supabase expert
Nam Tran
10 years as fullstack developer
ISHANTDEEP SINGH
Senior Software Engineer with 7+ years of experience in React, JavaScript, TypeScript, Next.js, and Node.js. I’ve also worked as a tech lead for startups, owning end-to-end technical execution including architecture, development, scaling, and delivery. I bring a strong mix of hands-on coding, product thinking, and technical leadership, and I’m comfortable building products from scratch as well as improving and scaling existing systems.
Daniel Vázquez
Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience on Startups, Government, big tech industry & consulting.
Luca Liberati
I work on monoliths and microservices, backends and frontends, manage K8s clusters and love to design apps architecture
Yovel Cohen
I got a lot of experience in building Long-horizon AI Agents in production, Backend apps that scale to millions of users and frontend knowledge as well.
Matthew Butler
Systems Development Engineer @ Amazon Web Services
Matthew Jordan
I've been working at a large software company named Kainos for 2 years, and mainly specialise in Platform Engineering. I regularly enjoy working on software products outside of work, and I'm a huge fan of game development using Unity. I personally enjoy Python & C# in my spare time, but I also specialise in multiple different platform-related technologies from my day job.
Describe what's wrong in plain English. No technical knowledge needed.
Get HelpFrequently Asked Questions
Why does Facebook show an old/wrong preview even after I fixed it?
Facebook caches (saves) your link preview the first time someone shares it. To force Facebook to refresh it, paste your URL into the Facebook Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) and click 'Scrape Again.'
What size should my preview image be?
Use 1200x630 pixels for the best results across all platforms. This size works well on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and messaging apps. Use JPG or PNG format, keep it under 5MB, and make sure important content isn't at the edges since different platforms crop differently.