Link Preview Checker

What a link preview is

Paste a link into a post or a chat and the platform fetches the page, reads a few meta tags from its <head>, and builds a card: an image, a title and a short description. That card is the link preview. Most people decide whether to click from the card alone, so a page with no image or a cut-off title loses clicks before anyone reads a word.

The tags are Open Graph (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url) plus a couple that X reads (twitter:card, twitter:image). This checker reads exactly those, the way a crawler does: from the raw HTML, without running your JavaScript.

What each platform reads

Common mistakes

• The image URL is relative, or uses http instead of https. Platforms refuse both.
• The image is behind a login, a redirect chain or a bot check, so the crawler cannot download it.
• The tags are injected by JavaScript. Crawlers read the HTML as served.
• og:url points at a different address than the canonical, so shares and stats split between two URLs.
• The title is the site name instead of the page, or runs past 60 characters and gets cut.
• The preview was cached before you fixed the tags. Use the platform's debugger, or change the image file name.

Questions

Why does the real card look different from yours?

Each platform renders in its own style and may have cached an older version of your page. Our previews follow each platform's layout closely enough to catch missing or wrong tags, which is what you can fix.

Do you store the pages you check?

No. The page is fetched once, the tags are read, and the result is kept in memory for a few minutes so repeat checks are fast. The page itself is never stored or shown.

Why can't it check my localhost or staging site?

The checker only fetches public addresses. Private networks, localhost and password-protected sites are refused, on purpose, for everyone's safety.

The page has no image. What now?

Make one with the OG Image Generator, upload it to your site, and add the tags from the Fix it block above.