Why your link preview looks broken (and how to fix it in 10 minutes)
You shared something you're proud of. A product launch. A new blog post. A case study that took you three weeks to write.
And on Twitter, LinkedIn, or in a Slack message, it showed up as a blank box. Or a favicon. Or a thumbnail from a completely different page.
First impressions on social happen in milliseconds. A broken preview is the equivalent of handing someone a crumpled business card.
Here's exactly why it happens and what to fix.
What is a link preview, actually?
When you paste a URL into Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, or Slack, the platform fetches the page in the background and reads a set of invisible metadata tags called Open Graph tags.
These tags live in the <head> of your HTML and tell social platforms: here's the title, here's the description, here's the image to use.
If those tags are missing, wrong, or pointing to a broken image URL, the preview breaks.
Five reasons your link preview looks broken
1. You have no OG image tag at all
This is the most common case. Someone built your website without adding Open Graph tags, and the platform has nothing to show. It falls back to whatever it can find — usually nothing useful.
How to check: Paste your URL into LinkedIn's Post Inspector or Twitter's Card Validator. If the image field is blank, this is your problem.
2. Your OG image URL is broken
You have a tag, but it points to a file that no longer exists. Maybe you renamed an image, migrated your site, or switched domains.
How to check: Find the og:image value in your page source. Paste it directly into a browser. If it 404s, there's your problem.
3. Your image is the wrong dimensions
Most platforms expect 1200×630 pixels. If your image is too small, some platforms refuse to show it. If it's too tall or too wide, it gets cropped in unpredictable ways.
The most common culprit: using a square logo as your OG image.
4. The platform cached an old version
You've fixed everything, but the preview still looks wrong. That's because LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook all cache OG metadata aggressively. Your fix hasn't propagated yet.
How to fix: Use the platform's official debugger to force a recache:
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/post-inspector
- Twitter/X: cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
- Facebook: developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
- Any website: Use the Opengraphly OG image checker to inspect the image and metadata before testing a specific platform.
Enter your URL, hit refresh or "Scrape Again", and the cache clears.
5. You're missing the twitter:image tag
Twitter reads og:image as a fallback, but it also has its own tag: twitter:image. If you're only setting og:image, some Twitter configurations will ignore it.
You need both:
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yoursite.com/og.png" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://yoursite.com/og.png" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />Without twitter:card set to summary_large_image, Twitter will show a tiny thumbnail instead of a full-width image card.
How to diagnose your specific problem
Open your page in a browser, right-click, and select View Page Source. Search for og:image.
If you find it: Copy the URL value and paste it directly into a browser tab. Does the image load? Yes → caching problem. No → broken URL.
If you don't find it: You're missing the tag entirely.
If you find it but it says something like /og.png with no domain: It's a relative URL. Most scrapers need absolute URLs with https://.
The permanent fix
You can add OG tags manually — every site builder has a place for custom meta tags. The problem is that it's easy to forget to update them. You add a tag once, your tagline changes six months later, and now your preview is out of date.
The better approach is a dynamic OG image — one that you design once and can update without changing the URL you've already put in your og:image tag.
That's what Opengraphly does. You design the image in a visual editor, copy the generated URL, paste it into your og:image tag. When you want to update the copy or swap the logo, you edit it in Opengraphly and the URL stays the same.
No more stale screenshots. No more mismatched branding. No more blank boxes.
Fix it today
Your next shared link should look this good.
Design your OG image once. Paste the URL once. Done forever. Takes about four minutes.
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