Why Your Links Look Broken on WhatsApp and LinkedIn, and How Open Graph Fixes It

You share a new blog post in a WhatsApp group, and instead of a crisp preview with an image and headline, it shows a bare URL, or worse, your logo stretched into a blurry square with the text "Home". That isn't the app's fault. It's reading tags your page is missing.

Those tags are called Open Graph tags, and they take about ten minutes to fix.

What Open Graph is

Open Graph is a set of <meta> tags, originally created by Facebook, that tell apps how to display a link. WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, Telegram, Discord and many others read them. X (Twitter) reads them too, with its own optional twitter: tags on top.

When someone pastes your link, the app fetches your page, looks for these tags, and builds the preview card from them. If they're missing, it guesses.

The tags every page should have

<meta property="og:title" content="How to Price Freelance Design Work">
<meta property="og:description" content="A simple formula for quoting projects with confidence.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/images/pricing-guide-1200x630.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/pricing-guide/">
<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

• og:title: the headline on the card. It can be shorter and punchier than your SEO title.
• og:description: one or two sentences. Many apps show only the first line, so lead with the point.
• og:image: the single biggest factor in whether people click. Use an absolute https:// URL.
• og:url: the canonical address, so shares are credited to one URL.
• og:type: website for your homepage, article for posts.
• twitter:card: summary_large_image gives you the big image format on X.

Getting the image right

• Size: 1200 × 630 pixels (a 1.91:1 ratio) works across nearly every platform.
• File size: keep it under about 300 KB. WhatsApp in particular may skip large images.
• Safe zone: keep text and faces away from the edges. Some apps crop to a square.
• Readable text: if you add a headline to the image, make it big. Previews are often shown small on phones.
• One per page: a specific image for each article gets more clicks than the same logo everywhere.

Why the preview doesn't update after you fix it

Platforms cache previews, sometimes for days. After you change your tags:

• Facebook: use the Sharing Debugger and click "Scrape Again".
• LinkedIn: use the Post Inspector, which refreshes the cache.
• WhatsApp: caches per link. Testing with a harmless query string (like ?v=2) shows the new version.
• X: fetches again over time. There's no manual refresh tool any more.

How to set it up

• WordPress: SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math add Open Graph tags and let you pick a social image per post.
• Shopify, Wix, Squarespace: each has a "social sharing image" setting at the site and page level.
• Custom sites: add the tags to your page template and fill them from each page's data.

Check your site

Paste any page into our free social share check. It shows a live preview of your link card, flags missing or broken tags, and lists the social profiles your site links to.

Good previews don't make bad content go viral, but bad previews quietly cost you clicks on everything you share.