How to Check Your Link Preview Before Sharing

01What a link preview is

When you paste a link into Facebook, LinkedIn, X, WhatsApp or Slack, the platform visits the page and builds a card with a title, short description and image. The card is what people decide to click on, so a missing or wrong image costs you traffic.

02Open Graph & Twitter tags

The card is built from meta tags in the page's head. The core ones are:

og:title and og:description: the card text.
og:image: the picture, ideally 1200 × 630 px, under 5 MB.
og:url: the canonical address of the page.
twitter:card set to summary_large_image for a big image on X.

03Common preview problems

Most issues come down to missing tags or images the platform can't fetch.

No image, or a logo that gets cropped badly.
The same generic title on every page.
Image URL that is relative, blocked or behind a login.
Old preview showing after you changed the page.

04How to refresh cached previews

Platforms store previews for days. After fixing your tags, use Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector to fetch the page again. For X and WhatsApp, a small change to the URL (such as adding ?v=2) forces a fresh preview.

05Test with Hazana

Hazana's Social Preview shows how a URL will look on the main platforms at once and lists the tags that are missing or too long, so you can fix them before you share.

Preview a link

Free tools for this guide

Social PreviewSee your link card on every platform.Open tool

Frequently asked questions

What size should my preview image be?

1200 × 630 px works across Facebook, LinkedIn and X. Keep important text near the centre.

Why does WhatsApp show no image?

Usually the og:image is missing, too large, or on a URL WhatsApp can't fetch. Use an absolute https URL to a normal JPG or PNG.

Do link previews affect SEO?

Not directly, but better previews get more clicks and shares, which helps your content get found.