Why does Facebook still show my old image?

Because it is showing the copy it kept from the last time it read your page, not the tags that are on it now. Facebook provides the Sharing Debugger for this: enter the address and ask it to fetch again. LinkedIn works the same way through the Post Inspector. Nothing you change on your own site forces either of them to look again.

What size should the image be?

1200 by 630 is the size most people use. The number that matters more is the lower limit: under roughly 600px wide, most platforms give up on the large image and show a small thumbnail instead. Keep important detail away from the edges, because the crop is taken from the middle.

Do I need the X tags if I already have Open Graph?

No. X falls back to the Open Graph tags when its own are absent, so a page with only Open Graph still gets a card. Add the X tags when you want something different there, or when you want the large image card rather than the small one.

Why is my image not showing at all?

Three things cause it. There is no image tag, or the address in the tag cannot be loaded, or the image is small enough that the platform dropped it. The preview here loads the image the same way, so if it is blank here it will be blank there.

Does any of this change my ranking?

No. These tags tell a platform how to draw a card, and Google does not use them to rank anything. What they change is whether somebody who sees the link clicks it. For how the same page looks in search results, use the SERP Preview.

Is the address I enter stored anywhere?

It is sent to sona.to, which fetches the page and returns the tags it found. The page itself is not returned or kept. The same address entered twice inside five minutes is only fetched once. Writing the tags in by hand sends nothing anywhere.

Where do I put these tags?

In the head of the page, alongside the title tag. Most site builders and content systems have a field for the sharing image and description, which writes them for you. To write the full set by hand, use the Meta Tag Generator.

Home / Free tools / Social Share Preview

See what your page looks like when somebody shares the link

See the card six platforms build when somebody shares a link to your page.

Share a link and the platform does not simply print the address. It fetches the page, reads a few tags out of the head, and builds a card: one image, one headline, one line of text. Which tags it reads depends on where the link was posted. X looks for its own tags before falling back to the Open Graph ones, while Facebook and LinkedIn read Open Graph and nothing else. Leave a tag out and you do not get a gap; the platform picks something off the page instead, and what it picks is often the first text it finds. Enter an address below to read the tags from a page, or write them yourself, and the card is drawn the way each of the six platforms builds it.

Page address optional

Headline Description Image address

Nothing here is saved. Entering an address sends it to sona.to, which reads the tags from that page and returns them. The page itself is not kept.

X X tags first

Facebook Open Graph only

LinkedIn No description shown

Slack Either set

Discord Either set

Which tags a platform reads

X checks its own tags first and falls back to Open Graph when they are absent. Facebook and LinkedIn read Open Graph only, so an X tag does nothing for them at all. Slack and Discord take either. One page can therefore produce six cards that do not match each other, and a headline you are sure you set can be missing on half of them. Each preview here follows the order that platform actually uses.

Facebook and LinkedIn remember what they read

Both keep a copy of what they found the first time they fetched your page, and they hold it for a long time. Fix the tags and the card does not change, which is the most common reason a correct fix looks like it failed. You have to ask the platform to read the page again, and both provide a tool for it: the Sharing Debugger at Facebook, the Post Inspector at LinkedIn. No tool can clear those caches for you, this one included. What you see here is what the tags say now, not what Facebook is still showing.

A missing tag is not a blank space

Platforms substitute rather than leave a hole. With no description tag they take a line from the page, usually the first text they come across, and on a lot of sites the first text is a menu label or a cookie notice. With no image the card collapses to a line of text beside a favicon. The previews follow those substitutions.

Size, and where the crop lands

Below roughly 600px wide, most platforms stop showing the large image card and drop to a small thumbnail beside the text, which is a far weaker card. 1200 by 630 is the size most people target. Crops are taken from the middle, so anything sitting near the top, bottom or edges can vanish: a phone number along the bottom of a photograph, a name across the top of a poster. The image is loaded in your browser and measured here, so the size you see is the real one rather than whatever the width tag claims.

What it shows

One set of tags, six cards, because the platforms do not read them the same way.

Six platforms

Drawn to each layout
In the tag order each one uses
Side by side

The image

Measured in your browser
Real pixels, not the tag
Cropped the way it will crop

The words

Headline and description
Where each one is cut
Which tag each came from

Read from a live page

Whatever tags are there
Every fallback followed
Nothing kept

How to use it

Enter the address

Type or paste the address of the page. Its title, description, canonical, favicon and every Open Graph and X tag are read and filled in below.

Or write the tags yourself

Leave the address empty and type a headline, a description and the address of an image. Useful for trying a set of tags before you put them on the page.

Read the six cards

Look at where the headline and description get cut, and at what each platform substituted for anything you left out.

Change the tags, then ask for a fresh read

The tags go in the head of the page. On Facebook and LinkedIn the old card stays until you ask them to look again.

What these words mean

Open Graph

A set of meta tags in the head of a page, each name beginning with og, that tell a platform which image, headline and description to use. Facebook introduced it and most platforms read it now.

Card

What a platform draws in place of a bare link: an image, a headline, a line of text and the domain name. Its shape and how much text survives differ by platform.

Cache

The copy a platform keeps of what it read from your page. Facebook and LinkedIn both keep one, which is why the card they show can be older than the tags on the page.

Questions