When someone shares your page on social media or in a chat app, the preview comes from Open Graph tags (and Twitter / X card tags).
The key tags
og:title— the headline.og:description— one or two sentences.og:image— a 1200 × 630 image works widely.og:url— the canonical address.
Why it matters for SEO
Previews do not rank pages directly, but attractive shares bring visitors, mentions and links.
Images that work
- 1200 × 630 pixels, under a few hundred kilobytes.
- Text large enough to read on a phone, if any.
- Your logo or brand colours so shares are recognisable.
When previews do not update
Social platforms cache previews. After changing tags, use the platform's own debugging or sharing tool to refresh the cached preview.
Per-page tags
Give every important page its own title, description and image. A blog post shared with your home page's generic preview gets fewer clicks.
Templates
Most platforms can fill Open Graph tags automatically from the page title, description and featured image. Set this up once in your template and check a few pages, rather than writing tags by hand.
Tools
Check a page with the Open Graph checker and the Twitter card checker, see how it looks with the social share preview, and generate tags with the Open Graph generator.
0 comments