See Your Link's Share Card Before You Post It

You post your link to LinkedIn or a group chat and instead of a clean card with your image and headline, you get a blank box, the wrong photo, or a bare URL. That's an Open Graph problem, and it quietly costs you clicks every time you share. My social preview checker reads the exact tags that decide how your link renders, shows you the card before you post, and flags what's broken.

What This Tool Actually Checks

Paste a URL. The tool fetches your live HTML, strips out <script>, <style> and comment noise so commented-out or templated meta tags don't pollute the read, and pulls the tags that platforms use to build a link preview:

• <title> and <meta name="description"> — the fallback headline and summary.
• og:title, og:description, og:image, og:type, og:url, og:site_name — the Open Graph tags Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack and iMessage read first.
• twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image — what X and many chat apps render.

Crucially, it resolves your og:image against the page URL and checks whether the result is an absolute https:// URL — because a relative or http image is exactly the kind of tag that passes a human eyeball but gets silently dropped by Facebook and LinkedIn, leaving a blank card.

Then it flags issues, each only when it genuinely occurs: missing og:title, og:description or og:image; an og:image that isn't absolute https; missing twitter:card; a missing or over-long <title> (over 60 characters truncates); and a meta description that's missing, too short (under 50 characters), or too long (over 160).

Why This Differs From Just Sharing the Link

The obvious "test" is to post the link somewhere and see what happens. But the platforms aggressively cache previews. Once Facebook or LinkedIn has scraped your URL, it holds onto whatever it found — so if your tags were broken the first time, you'll keep seeing the broken card long after you've fixed it, and you can't tell whether your fix worked without clearing each platform's cache by hand.

This checker reads the tags fresh from your live HTML every run, so you see the current truth, not a stale cache. And it does the one thing eyeballing a link can't: it tells you why the card is broken. A blank image on Facebook gives you no error message. This tells you the og:image is relative instead of absolute https, which is the single most common reason a card renders empty — and a thing you'd never spot by looking at the rendered page.

It also catches the quiet length problems. Your title looks fine in the browser tab; it gets cut mid-word in a search result and some share cards at 60 characters. The tool counts it for you.

What You'll See When You Run It

Enter a page URL and you get a rough rendering of the share card — image, headline, summary — roughly as a feed would show it. Below that, a "what to fix" list, then the full table of tags it found, with empty values marked in red.

A common result on a small business page:

• og:image — "is not an absolute https URL": your share image is referenced as /images/card.png instead of the full https://… path, so it'll be dropped.
• twitter:card — "missing": X will render a bare link instead of a rich card.
• description — "long (184 chars)": gets cut mid-sentence in search and previews.

Each fix is a one-line change in your page's head. Re-run after publishing to confirm the card is clean.

What It Does NOT Do

It reads the tags; it doesn't fetch or validate the image file itself — it won't tell you the image is the wrong dimensions, too heavy, or returns a 404, only that the URL is present and absolute https. It checks one page at a time and reads static HTML, so tags injected by JavaScript may not be seen (which matters, because the platform scrapers may not see them either). And it can't clear the platforms' own caches for you — after you fix your tags, you may still need to refresh the preview in Facebook's Sharing Debugger or LinkedIn's Post Inspector to force a re-scrape.

Who Should Run This

Anyone who shares their own links and wants them to actually pull a click — founders posting to LinkedIn, anyone running a newsletter or promoting content, anyone whose links land flat in chat apps. Check a page once before you build a campaign around sharing it; a working card is one of the cheapest conversion wins there is.

Preview your share card and see what Facebook, LinkedIn, X and Slack will render. If your link tags are broken across many pages, the full website audit checks them site-wide alongside everything else that decides whether people click.