What Are Open Graph Tags? (And Why Your Links Look Broken When Shared)
When you paste a link into Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, or WhatsApp, the platform tries to build a small preview card showing an image, a title, and a short description. When that card shows the wrong image, no image at all, or a chunk of raw text instead of a headline, the underlying cause is almost always missing Open Graph tags.
The Core Open Graph Tags
Open Graph is a set of meta tags, originally created by Facebook, that live in a page's <head> and explicitly describe how the page should look when shared:
<meta property="og:title" content="Your Page Title">
<meta property="og:description" content="A short summary.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yoursite.com/preview.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://yoursite.com/page/">
Without these tags, social platforms fall back to guessing — often grabbing the first image or paragraph they find in the raw HTML, which is why broken previews tend to look randomly wrong rather than simply empty.
Image Size Actually Matters
The most common reason an og:image fails to display properly is an image that is too small or the wrong aspect ratio. The safe, widely recommended size is 1200 × 630 pixels. Anything significantly smaller may be rejected by some platforms entirely.
Why Old Previews Keep Showing Up
Social platforms cache the preview data the first time a URL is shared, and that cache can persist for weeks. If you update your Open Graph tags but the old broken preview keeps appearing, the fix isn't on your site — it's forcing the platform to re-scrape:
- Facebook / Instagram: use the Facebook Sharing Debugger and click "Scrape Again"
- LinkedIn: use the LinkedIn Post Inspector
- Twitter/X: tags update automatically but can take longer to refresh
Conclusion
Open Graph tags are a small addition to your page's head that directly control the first impression your content makes when someone shares it. Add them to every page you expect people to share, use a properly sized image, and always verify the result with a debugger tool rather than assuming it works.