Link Preview Not Showing on WhatsApp or Facebook? Fix og:image

The short answer

A link preview (the card with an image, title and description) comes from Open Graph meta tags in your page's <head>. If the preview is missing or wrong, the cause is almost always one of four things: the tags are missing, the og:image URL is not a full public https address, the image is too small or blocked, or the app is still showing an old cached preview. Generate the tags with the Meta Tag Generator, use a 1200 × 630 pixel image, and then ask Facebook's Sharing Debugger or LinkedIn's Post Inspector to fetch the page again.

How link previews work

When you paste a link into WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack or many other apps, the app's server visits the page and reads tags like these:

• og:title for the bold headline
• og:description for the short text
• og:image for the picture
• og:url for the canonical address

If the server cannot read the page, or finds no tags, it shows a bare link or guesses from the page title. Importantly, it fetches the page as a visitor with no login, and most apps store (cache) what they found. A preview you fixed an hour ago can still show the old version until the cache is refreshed.

Step 1: Add complete Open Graph tags

Open the Meta Tag Generator and fill in:

Page title: the headline you want in the card. The counter turns red after 60 characters, a common limit for search result titles.

Meta description: one or two sentences. The counter turns red after 160 characters.

Page URL: the full address of the page, starting with https.

Image URL: the full address of the preview image.

Copy the generated code and paste it inside the <head> section of the page. The code includes the standard title and description tags, the Open Graph tags (og:type, og:url, og:title, og:description and og:image), and matching Twitter tags. When you add an image, it sets the Twitter card type to summary_large_image so X shows a large picture.

If your site runs on WordPress, Shopify or another platform, use its SEO settings or an SEO plugin to set these fields instead of pasting code, otherwise you may end up with two conflicting sets of tags.

Step 2: Get the image right

Facebook's developer documentation on images in link shares gives these guidelines:

Rule	Value
Recommended size	At least 1200 × 630 pixels
Aspect ratio	About 1.91:1
Minimum size	200 × 200 pixels (shown small)
Maximum file size	8 MB

A 1200 × 630 JPG or PNG works well on Facebook, LinkedIn and WhatsApp. Keep important text away from the edges, because some apps crop the image to a square or a narrower shape.

Then check the image address itself:

• Use a full URL, such as https://example.com/images/share.jpg, not /images/share.jpg. Many crawlers do not resolve relative paths.
• Use https. A plain http image often fails in apps that require secure links.
• Make it public. Open the image URL in a private browser window. If it asks you to log in, redirects to a home page or downloads instead of showing, the crawler cannot use it either.
• Do not block it. If robots.txt blocks your images folder, or a firewall blocks unknown bots, some crawlers cannot fetch the image.

Facebook's documentation also recommends adding og:image:width and og:image:height tags, because without them the crawler may need to download the image before it can show it, and the first person to share a new link may see no image. The Meta Tag Generator does not add these two tags, so add them yourself below its output, for example <meta property="og:image:width" content="1200" /> and <meta property="og:image:height" content="630" />.

If you need to cut an image to 1200 × 630, use the Crop Image tool with exact pixel values, or Resize Image to scale it.

Step 3: Check the page source

Open your page, right-click and choose View Page Source, then search (Ctrl+F) for og:image. Check that:

• The tag exists once, inside the <head>.
• The content value is the full image URL you expect.
• There is only one og:title and one og:description. Duplicate tags from a theme and a plugin can make apps pick the wrong one.

If the tags only appear after JavaScript runs (common with some single-page app setups), crawlers that do not run JavaScript will not see them. The tags need to be in the HTML the server sends.

Step 4: Clear the old preview

Fixing the tags does not update previews that apps have already cached.

• Facebook: paste the URL into Facebook's Sharing Debugger and click Scrape Again. It shows exactly which tags Facebook read and warns about missing or broken ones. This is the best single test for any Open Graph problem.
• LinkedIn: paste the URL into LinkedIn's Post Inspector. It fetches the page again and shows the preview LinkedIn will use.
• WhatsApp: there is no public refresh tool. A useful trick is to share the link with a harmless query string added, such as ?v=2 at the end, so WhatsApp treats it as a new link. Also check the preview on the Sharing Debugger first, because the same tag problems affect both.
• X: X reads its own twitter: tags and also falls back to Open Graph tags for missing ones. Post the link (or a version with ?v=2) to see the new card.

Quick diagnosis

What you see	Likely cause	Fix
No preview at all	No tags, or the crawler is blocked	Add tags; check robots.txt and firewall rules
Title but no image	og:image missing, relative, http, or blocked	Use a full https URL to a public image
Old image or title	Cached preview	Scrape Again in Sharing Debugger; Post Inspector; add ?v=2 for WhatsApp
Small square thumbnail	Image too small or wrong ratio	Use 1200 × 630
Wrong text from a plugin	Duplicate tags	Keep one set of Open Graph tags
Image works for some pages only	Each page needs its own og:image	Set an image per page or a site-wide default

Common mistakes

• Testing with a link you already shared. The app shows its cached copy; use the debugger or a new query string.
• Using a logo as the share image. A small square logo is shown as a tiny thumbnail. Use a 1200 × 630 image.
• Pointing og:url at a different page. Some apps follow og:url and show that page's preview instead.
• Putting the tags in the body. They belong in the head.
• Forgetting the staging site. If the live page still has the old tags, the fix was not deployed.

For what each tag does for search engines as well as social apps, see Meta Tags for SEO in 2026.