The OG image mistakes that are killing your click-through rate

Most OG images are bad. Not in a subjective "I don't like the design" way — in a measurable "this is actively hurting your click-through rate" way.

Here are the six mistakes that come up most often, and exactly what to do about each one.

1. Wrong image dimensions

The standard for OG images is 1200×630 pixels. That's a 1.91:1 aspect ratio.

Most platforms will display images at this ratio and crop anything that doesn't fit. If your image is square (1:1), you'll get the sides cut off. If it's too small, some platforms won't show it at all.

The specific failure modes:

• Square image: Twitter and LinkedIn crop aggressively. You lose whatever's on the edges.
• Too small: LinkedIn requires at least 1200×627. Below that, it may not show the image.
• Portrait orientation: Your image gets heavily cropped and probably shows nothing useful.

The fix: Design for 1200×630 from the start. If you already have an image, check its dimensions. Anything that isn't close to the 1.91:1 ratio needs remaking.

2. Text that's too small to read as a thumbnail

Your OG image looks great on your 27-inch monitor. But on the platform, it's displayed at around 400–600 pixels wide. On mobile, smaller.

Most people never see your image at its actual 1200×630 size. They see a thumbnail.

Small, elegant typography that works beautifully at full size becomes completely illegible at thumbnail scale. If someone can't read your text in the first half-second, the image isn't doing its job.

The fix: Open your image and resize the browser window until it's about 400 pixels wide. If the text is hard to read, it's too small. A good rule: your headline shouldn't need more than two lines, and the font size shouldn't be below 48px in the original 1200×630 file.

3. No branding on the image

You share a link. A beautiful image appears. Nobody knows whose it is.

A link preview competes with everything else in a feed or message thread. If your OG image doesn't immediately say who you are, you've lost an opportunity.

This is especially painful for blog posts and content marketing. You spend time creating something worth reading, share it, and the preview looks like it could belong to anyone.

The fix: Put your logo in the image. Top-left corner is the convention — people look there first. It doesn't need to be large. It just needs to be there.

4. Using the same OG image on every page

Your homepage has an OG image. It's on-brand. Looks good.

So naturally, it ends up as the OG image for your pricing page. And your blog posts. And your docs. And your changelog. Every page on your site shares the same link preview.

This is better than no OG image, but it's a missed opportunity. Someone sharing your pricing page probably wants the preview to say something about pricing. A blog post should reference the article. A product launch should show what launched.

A generic OG image treats every share the same. Your content is not all the same.

The fix: At minimum, set different OG images for your homepage, pricing page, and any major content sections. Ideally, each blog post and landing page has its own.

5. Stale images with outdated copy

This is the one that embarrasses people the most when they notice it.

The OG image says "Beta." Or it has last year's tagline. Or it references a feature that no longer exists. Or the logo is the old version.

It sat there for months because nobody's job it was to update it.

Static OG images rot. You update your homepage copy, you remember to update the page — but nobody updates the OG image. It's invisible on the site itself, so it stays wrong indefinitely.

The fix: Either build a process to audit OG images whenever the site is updated, or switch to dynamic OG images that pull from a live template. Dynamic means when you update the template, all existing shares automatically reflect the change.

6. Missing the twitter:image tag (and twitter:card)

This one is specifically for Twitter / X, and it's extremely common.

Many sites set og:image correctly but don't include twitter:image or twitter:card. Twitter reads og:image as a fallback — but without twitter:card: summary_large_image, it defaults to a small square thumbnail instead of a full image card.

The difference in CTR between a thumbnail and a large image card is significant. A thumbnail is easy to scroll past. A full-width image card stops the scroll.

The fix: Add these three tags to every page:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://yoursite.com/og.png" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yoursite.com/og.png" />

All three. Every time.

The pattern

Every mistake above has the same root cause: OG images are treated as a one-time task rather than an ongoing part of the site.

Someone adds an OG image during the initial build, usually quickly, often with whatever is available. Then the site evolves and the OG image doesn't.

The sites that consistently have clean, accurate, on-brand link previews are the ones that have made OG images as easy to update as any other content on the site. That means either a solid process or tooling that makes updating fast enough that people actually do it.