Why Your Link Previews Look Wrong on Facebook, LinkedIn and X

You share a link to a new product or article and the preview is wrong. The picture is your logo instead of the product, the title is from an old version of the page, or there is no preview at all, just a bare address. Nothing is wrong with the page itself. The preview is built from a handful of tags in the page’s HTML, and from what the social network remembers about them.

Where previews come from

When a link is shared, the platform fetches the page and reads its Open Graph tags, a format introduced by Facebook that LinkedIn, X and most messaging apps also read. Four of them do the work:

• og:title, the headline shown in the preview
• og:description, the line or two beneath it
• og:image, the picture
• og:url, the address the preview links to, which should be the page’s main address

X also reads its own twitter: tags, including twitter:card, which chooses between a small and a large image. Where the other twitter: tags are missing, X uses the Open Graph ones instead, so a page rarely needs both sets in full.

If a page has no Open Graph tags, the platform has to guess, using the page title and an image it finds on the page. That is how logos, icons and payment badges end up in previews.

The image is usually the problem

• Size and shape. Facebook recommends images of at least 1200 by 630 pixels, a ratio of about 1.91 to 1. Much smaller images may be shown as a small thumbnail or not at all. A square product photo will be cropped, so check what survives the crop.
• A full address. The og:image value must be the complete address, starting https://, not a path relative to the site.
• Reachable by a robot. The image has to load for an automated visitor with no cookies and no login. An image caught by overly strict hotlink protection can fail without any warning.

Firewalls and bot protection

This catches out a lot of well protected sites. Previews are fetched by automated crawlers, such as Facebook’s facebookexternalhit and LinkedInBot, and security settings that challenge or block automated traffic can block them too. The result is a preview with no image, or no preview at all, while the page looks perfectly normal to you. If you use a firewall or a service such as Cloudflare, check its event log for blocked requests from those crawlers at the time you shared the link.

Why the old version keeps appearing

Platforms keep a copy of what they fetched. Change the image or title after a link has been shared, and the old preview can carry on appearing, because the platform is not fetching the page again.

Facebook and LinkedIn both provide a tool that fetches the page afresh and shows exactly what they see:

• Facebook Sharing Debugger at developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. Paste in the address and use Scrape Again. It also lists any tags it could not read.
• LinkedIn Post Inspector at linkedin.com/post-inspector, which does the same for LinkedIn.

Running a page through both before you share it, rather than after, is the simplest habit that avoids the problem. It also shows up missing tags while there is still time to fix them.

A quick checklist

1. View the page source and confirm og:title, og:description and og:image are present and describe this page, not the home page.
2. Open the og:image address in a private browser window to confirm it loads.
3. Check the image is at least 1200 by 630 pixels.
4. Run the address through the Facebook and LinkedIn tools and fix anything they report.
5. Share only once the preview looks right.

Most content management systems and SEO plugins generate these tags automatically from the page title, the excerpt and the featured image. That is why a missing featured image is such a common reason for a preview showing the wrong picture, and why it is worth setting one on every page you expect to share.