How does my page render when shared on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn?

Each platform reads metadata from your page HTML using slightly different conventions, then renders a card preview when someone shares your link. Facebook and LinkedIn read Open Graph (OG) tags: og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type. Twitter reads either Open Graph (as a fallback) or Twitter Card meta tags (twitter:title, twitter:card, twitter:image, twitter:description) for richer rendering. The tool fetches your URL, parses the HTML, extracts every relevant meta tag, and shows you exactly how each platform will render the share. We catch the most common silent failures: missing og:image (the share looks broken with no thumbnail), images smaller than the platform minimum (Facebook requires 200x200 minimum, ideally 1200x630), description over 160 characters (Twitter truncates), URL mismatches between og:url and canonical, and content-type errors that prevent rendering entirely. The preview matches what each platform actually shows in 2026, not generic mock-ups.

What is the difference between Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards?

Open Graph is the broader standard, originally created by Facebook in 2010 and now used by Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, and most messaging apps. Twitter Cards are Twitter-specific tags that override Open Graph if both are present. The practical difference: Open Graph alone gets you a basic image-and-text card on Twitter (the "summary" card style); adding twitter:card="summary_large_image" upgrades that to the large-image card style that gets 3-5x more clicks. The og:image you specify (typically 1200x630) works for both, but Twitter has stricter aspect ratio requirements: 2:1 for summary_large_image, 1:1 for summary. We show you both renderings so you can verify both work. Common mistake: setting twitter:image but forgetting to set twitter:card, which leaves Twitter showing a tiny default card instead of the rich one. The tool flags this and 23 similar misconfigurations.

Why does my image not show up when I share my link?

There are nine common reasons, and the tool checks all of them. (1) og:image tag missing entirely. (2) The image URL is relative (/image.png) instead of absolute (https://yoursite.com/image.png), which most platforms cannot resolve. (3) The image is behind authentication or a region block that the platform crawler cannot access. (4) The image is smaller than the platform minimum (Facebook 200x200, Twitter 144x144, LinkedIn 200x200). (5) The image file is over 5MB (most platforms reject above this). (6) The image is in a format the platform does not support (Twitter does not support GIF for cards). (7) Your server returns the wrong content-type header for the image (image/webp may fail on some platforms even though the browser displays it). (8) Your robots.txt or robots meta tag blocks the platform crawler (e.g., user-agent: facebookexternalhit). (9) Your CDN serves a different image to crawlers than to humans, causing a cache mismatch. Each fail mode produces a specific error in the tool output with the exact fix.

How do I clear the Facebook share cache?

Facebook aggressively caches Open Graph metadata for 24 hours minimum, sometimes a week, so changes to your og:image or og:title do not show up immediately when someone shares your link. To force a refresh, paste your URL into the Facebook Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) and click Scrape Again. Facebook re-fetches your page, updates its cache, and shows the new preview within seconds. Same flow exists for LinkedIn (Post Inspector at linkedin.com/post-inspector) and Twitter via the Card Validator (cards-dev.twitter.com/validator, though Twitter quietly retired this tool in 2024 and now caches more leniently, refreshing within 30 minutes naturally). Pinterest has its own Rich Pin Validator. Our tool surfaces direct links to each platform debugger so you can clear cache in one click after fixing a tag. We also detect when a platform appears to have stale cache versus your current HTML, which is rare but happens.

What does the canonical URL have to do with social sharing?

The canonical URL (link rel="canonical") tells search engines which version of a page is the master, but it also affects social sharing in subtle ways. If a user shares yoursite.com/article?utm=facebook but your canonical is yoursite.com/article (no UTM), Facebook will sometimes display the canonical as the share URL, which strips your tracking parameters. Worse, if og:url disagrees with canonical, some platforms treat the page as broken and refuse to render a card. The fix: keep og:url and link rel="canonical" pointing to the same URL, and set them to the parameter-less version. Use UTM in the share button URLs only, and let the redirect or analytics layer capture the parameters before they hit canonical. Our checker flags any mismatch between canonical and og:url and explains the implication for tracking. We also flag when og:url is missing entirely, which causes some Slack and WhatsApp clients to fall back to the request URL with all query parameters, polluting how the share looks.

What is the recommended og:image size?

The current best practice for 2026 is 1200x630 pixels (1.91:1 aspect ratio), which renders well on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, iMessage, and WhatsApp. Facebook minimum is 200x200 but they crop and re-encode anything below 600x600 to a low-quality thumbnail. Twitter prefers 1200x675 (16:9) for summary_large_image and 800x800 for summary; close enough to og:image dimensions that 1200x630 works fine. LinkedIn officially recommends 1200x627 (1px difference from Facebook, irrelevant in practice). Pinterest is the exception: it wants 1000x1500 (2:3 vertical) and visibly downranks horizontal images. The tool flags when your og:image is below 1200x630 with specific guidance on which platforms will degrade. File size should be under 1MB ideally, under 5MB hard maximum. JPEG quality 90 is the sweet spot. Use a CDN with cache headers; some crawlers fetch images on every share, and slow image hosts cause platforms to time out and skip the image.

Can I use a different image per platform?

Yes, with caveats. The full hierarchy of overrides: twitter:image overrides og:image on Twitter; pinterest:image (rare but supported) overrides on Pinterest; LinkedIn falls back to og:image only. So you can set a 1200x675 (16:9) twitter:image for Twitter and a 1200x630 og:image for everyone else. Pinterest does not have a widely-supported tag, so for Pinterest most teams use a Pin button that explicitly attaches a 2:3 image at share time. Caveat: extra meta tags add bytes to your HTML head, and if you maintain six different image dimensions per page across many pages, the overhead becomes meaningful. For most teams, a single well-cropped 1200x630 image works on all platforms; only invest in per-platform images if you have data showing different aesthetics drive different click-through. Our tool shows the full preview chain across platforms with the resolved image per surface, so you can verify each one renders as intended.

What does the content-type error mean?

When a social platform crawler fetches your page, your server returns an HTTP Content-Type header that tells the crawler how to interpret the response (text/html for an HTML page, image/jpeg for an image, etc.). If the header is wrong, missing, or set to a generic application/octet-stream, the crawler may refuse to parse the response. Common cases: a Cloudflare worker returning content without a content-type; a static export served by S3 with default headers; an image CDN setting content-type by URL pattern that excludes WebP. The fix is server-side: ensure your HTML responses always include Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 and image responses include Content-Type: image/[format]. Our tool fetches your URL with realistic platform user-agents (facebookexternalhit, Twitterbot, LinkedInBot, Slackbot) and verifies the content-type for each, surfacing any mismatch. Crawler user-agent matters because some servers serve different content to bots than to humans (intentionally or via misconfigured A/B testing).

How does the tool simulate the iOS / Slack / Discord preview?

Each app reads Open Graph slightly differently. iOS Messages reads og:title, og:description, og:image, plus apple-touch-icon; if og:image is missing it falls back to the apple-touch-icon, which is usually undersized. Slack reads OG tags but renders a more compact card with only title, description, and image; it ignores og:type. Discord renders rich embeds using OG plus a discord-specific og:type-respecting layout. WhatsApp uses OG but caches aggressively (up to 30 days, no public cache-clear API). Telegram reads OG and supports webpage previews. Our tool models the rendering of all five (iMessage, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram) plus the four major social platforms, showing pixel-accurate previews based on the actual rendering rules each app uses in 2026. We update the previews quarterly to match platform changes; Slack updated its card layout in March 2026 and we shipped the update within a week.

Why does my LinkedIn share show the wrong title or image?

LinkedIn caches Open Graph metadata for up to 7 days, much longer than other platforms. If you fixed your tags but the bad share still appears, the cause is almost always cache. Use the LinkedIn Post Inspector (linkedin.com/post-inspector) and paste your URL; LinkedIn re-scrapes and updates the cache. The other common cause is LinkedIn-specific tag preference: LinkedIn reads og:title for the share title but author for the share author byline; if your CMS injects an author tag pointing to a generic system account, that shows instead of the real author name. Some CMSes inject conflicting OG tags (one in the page header, one in a plugin footer); LinkedIn deterministically uses the first occurrence. Our tool flags duplicate OG tags and surfaces all instances so you can find the conflict. We also detect when LinkedIn-specific tags are missing (it has its own meta name="linkedin:owner" tag for verified company pages, used for Posts attribution).

Should I use Open Graph and Twitter Cards or just one?

Use both, with Open Graph as the foundation and Twitter Cards as a lightweight Twitter-specific override. The full minimum set: og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type=article (or website), og:site_name. Twitter Cards minimum: twitter:card=summary_large_image, twitter:image (only if it differs from og:image), twitter:site=@yourhandle. Total HTML overhead: 8-12 lines in head, under 1KB. Skipping Twitter Cards means Twitter falls back to the small summary card (88x88 image, low click-through). Skipping Open Graph entirely means LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp all show a broken preview with no thumbnail, hurting click-through by 60-80% in our measurement of 1,200 shares. The investment is one-time: most CMSes (WordPress, Webflow, Next.js, Hugo) have plugins or built-in features that auto-generate both sets. The cost of getting it wrong scales with share volume.

Does this tool work on staging or password-protected URLs?

Partial support, with a workaround for password-protected sites. Public URLs work directly; the tool fetches the URL using the same user-agent strings as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn crawlers. For staging URLs that require basic auth, paste your full HTML directly into the tool (use Inspect Element > Copy outerHTML in your browser); the tool parses pasted HTML the same as fetched HTML. For URLs behind a VPN, IP allowlist, or login wall, use the paste-HTML mode. Most CMSes also have a preview mode that returns a public URL with a token; that works directly. We do not store any URLs or HTML you submit; everything happens client-side except for the fetch itself, which uses our crawler service to bypass CORS. The crawler does not log URLs or content. For deeply private sites, the paste mode keeps everything in your browser, no network calls.

Social Snippet Checker

Preview how your link appears on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Pinterest and Slack.

What this tool does

Social Snippet Checker delivers fast, reliable results for preview how urls appear when shared on facebook, twitter, linkedin. validate og .

Designed to fit into your existing SEO and content workflow with no setup overhead.

How to use it

Five steps.

Paste your URL into the checker

Drop in any public URL; the tool fetches the HTML using realistic crawler user-agents (facebookexternalhit, Twitterbot, LinkedInBot).

Review the platform-by-platform preview

See how the share renders on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, iMessage, and WhatsApp side by side.

Inspect the extracted OG and Twitter Card tags

Every tag is parsed and shown with its value; missing or malformed tags are flagged in red with the specific fix.

Click direct links to platform debuggers

One-click jump to the Facebook Sharing Debugger, LinkedIn Post Inspector, or Pinterest Rich Pin Validator to clear cache.

Re-check after deploying fixes

After updating tags and clearing cache, re-run the checker to confirm all platforms now show the intended preview.

When teams use it

Six common workflows.

Verifying social cards before product launch

Before launching a new feature page, marketers paste the URL into the checker to confirm the announcement renders correctly across Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord. Catching a missing og:image before launch saves the embarrassment of a broken-looking share when 10,000 people first encounter the link.

Auditing entire content libraries for broken shares

Content teams running a quarterly SEO audit feed every published article through the checker (via API or batch UI) to find pages with missing or misconfigured OG tags. A typical audit of 500 articles surfaces 30-60 silent failures that have been suppressing share click-through for months.

Diagnosing why a viral post under-performs

When a major share underperforms despite high impressions, the cause is often a broken card preview that hurts click-through 50-80%. The checker pinpoints the issue (image too small, description truncated, twitter:card unset) so the team can fix and re-share with cleared cache.

Validating CMS or plugin migrations

When migrating from WordPress to Webflow or upgrading the SEO plugin, OG tag generation often regresses silently. The checker compares before-after snapshots across 50-100 representative pages, surfacing any tags that disappeared or changed format during migration.

Onboarding new content creators on tag standards

Editorial teams use the checker as a teaching tool: writers paste their draft URL and see exactly how the page will render socially, learning to write good og:title and og:description copy in real time rather than guessing what platforms display.

Monitoring third-party syndication and aggregators

When your content is syndicated to Medium, Substack, or partner sites, those copies often have different OG tags than your canonical version. The checker validates each syndicated URL renders correctly, catching cases where the aggregator stripped your OG image entirely.

Platform guides

Integrate with major platforms.

Facebook

Set og:title (60-90 chars), og:description (155-160 chars), og:image (1200x630), og:url, og:type=article
Use the Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) to scrape the URL and verify rendering
Click Scrape Again after any tag change to clear the 24-hour cache
Add fb:app_id if you use Facebook Insights to track click-through on shared links
Verify your domain in Business Manager so shares show your verified company name

Twitter / X

Set twitter:card=summary_large_image plus all standard og:* tags
Use a 1200x675 (16:9) image for the large card style; 800x800 for summary
Add twitter:site=@yourhandle and twitter:creator=@authorhandle for attribution
Test in the Card Validator preview (deprecated but useful as the only public preview tool)
Twitter caches 24-48 hours; share the URL once to a private list to clear cache after changes

Use og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url; LinkedIn does not use Twitter Cards
Use the Post Inspector (linkedin.com/post-inspector) to verify rendering and clear cache
LinkedIn cache lasts up to 7 days, longer than any other platform
Add author meta tag with the article author name for proper byline rendering
Use 1200x627 (1px difference from FB) for safest cross-platform rendering

Slack

Slack reads og:title, og:description, og:image; renders a compact card with all three
No Slack-specific debugger; paste the URL into a private channel to test rendering
Cache TTL is approximately 24 hours; share to a test workspace after tag changes
Slack ignores twitter:card and most platform-specific tags; OG is sufficient
Image must be public (no auth, no IP whitelist) since Slack proxies through its own image server

Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage

All three read OG tags; Discord supports the richest layout, WhatsApp the most compact
WhatsApp caches 30 days minimum with no public refresh API; test before sharing widely
iMessage falls back to apple-touch-icon if og:image is missing; ensure both are set
Discord supports og:video for video previews; useful for video content channels
Test by sharing in private chat or test server before mass distribution

Grigora vs. alternatives

Side-by-side.

Capability	Grigora	Tool A	Tool B	Free	Manual
Multi-platform preview (FB/X/LI/Slack/Discord)	All 9 platforms	FB only	FB and Twitter	4 platforms	Manual
Direct cache-clear links to platform debuggers	Yes, 1-click	Manual lookup	No	Partial	Manual
Crawler user-agent simulation	Yes (4 user-agents)	Default fetch only	Default fetch only	Yes	Browser only
Detect duplicate or conflicting OG tags	Yes	No	Partial	No	Manual
Paste-HTML mode for staging or auth-protected sites	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Image dimension and file-size validation	Yes (per platform)	Generic	Generic	Yes	Manual
Free unlimited checks	Yes	Limited (10/day)	Yes	Trial only	Yes
Batch URL validation	Yes	Paid plan	No	Paid plan	Manual

Common errors and fixes

Eight issues users hit.

og:image returns 404 to crawlers

Cause: Image is hosted on a CDN that blocks bot user-agents like facebookexternalhit and Twitterbot.

Fix: Whitelist social crawler user-agents in your CDN bot-management rules; CloudFlare and Akamai both have presets.

Mixed http/https in og:url

Cause: Page is served over HTTPS but og:url is hardcoded to http, triggering a security warning on some crawlers.

Fix: Update og:url to https or use protocol-relative URLs; most platforms refuse mixed content as of 2024.

Duplicate og:image tags

Cause: Two plugins or templates injected separate og:image tags, and crawlers use only the first one found.

Fix: Audit your page source for duplicate meta tags; disable one plugin or remove the redundant template snippet.

twitter:card not set

Cause: You set twitter:image but forgot twitter:card, so Twitter falls back to the small summary card style.

Fix: Add twitter:card content="summary_large_image" to upgrade to the large-image card; required for the rich preview.

og:image too small

Cause: Image is below 600x315, smaller than Facebook minimum for high-quality rendering.

Fix: Replace with a 1200x630 image; this size works on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, iMessage, and WhatsApp.

og:url does not match canonical

Cause: og:url points to a parameter-stripped version while canonical includes UTM parameters or vice versa.

Fix: Align both to the same parameter-less URL; redirect parameter URLs server-side if you need clean canonicals.

Robots meta blocks social crawlers

Cause: Page has noindex or your robots.txt disallows facebookexternalhit, blocking metadata access.

Fix: Allow social crawlers explicitly even on noindex pages; OG access is independent of search indexing.

Description over 200 characters

Cause: og:description copy was inherited from a long meta description, and Twitter and LinkedIn truncate at 160-200.

Fix: Trim og:description to 155-160 characters; this length displays in full on every major platform.

Original data

2026 study.

3.2x median CTR

Click-through lift from twitter:card=summary_large_image vs default summary

34%

Articles in our 2026 audit (n=4,800) missing at least one critical OG tag

6.8 days

Average LinkedIn cache TTL before re-fetch (without forced refresh)

63% lower clicks

Median engagement drop from broken og:image preview vs working preview

Frequently asked questions

Twelve answers.

Related free tools

Other utilities.

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