OpenGraph is a protocol that enables any web page to transform into a rich object in a social graph.
When you share a link on Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or WhatsApp, the platform scrapes the page's OpenGraph meta tags to display a rich preview with a title, description, and image.
How OpenGraph works
OpenGraph meta tags are placed in the <head> of your HTML. When a social platform's crawler visits your URL, it reads these tags and uses them to construct a share card.
Required tags
The most important tags are og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url, but every page should include at minimum the following OpenGraph tags:
og:title — The title of the page (should match the HTML title)
og:description — A brief description of the content
og:image — An image URL
og:url — The canonical URL of the page
og:type — The type of content (article, website, etc.)
og:site_name — The name of your website
For Twitter (X), add the twitter:card meta tag with value summary_large_image to enable large image previews.
See the OpenGraph tags for this page below.
<meta property="og:title" content="OpenGraph" />Image requirements
Social platforms have specific image requirements for share cards:
| Platform | Minimum size | Max file size | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 600 × 315 pixels | 8 MB | 1.91:1 ratio preferred | |
| 200 × 200 pixels | 5 MB | 1.91:1 ratio recommended | |
| 300 × 200 pixels | — | Uses og:image directly |
|
| X (Twitter) | 300 × 157 pixels | 5 MB | Large image summary card uses 2:1 ratio |
Troubleshooting
If your shared links are not displaying correctly, check for these common problems:
When I share the page via Facebook the linked title is unclickable
There are two potential causes, namely:
The URL specified in your og:url tag doesn't match the actual page URL. The clickable link comes from og:url — if that's missing, wrong, or points elsewhere, Facebook can't resolve where the link should go and falls back to displaying the title as non-clickable text.
You will have to compare your og:url with the link of the actual page.
Some web hosts, like Xneelo, blocks Facebook's crawlers to prevent performance degradation when malfunctioning crawlers exhaust server capacity.
You will have to reach out to your web host and request that they unblock facebookexternalhit, facebookcatalog, and facebot.
When sharing pages to Facebook the post's old images keep showing up
Social platforms usually cache previously scraped data.
You will have to use their debug tools (or APIs) to force a re-scrape.
To force a re-scrape for Facebook, copy-paste the relevant URL into the official Facebook Sharing Debugger.
To force a re-scrape for LinkedIn, copy-paste the relevant URL into the official LinkedIn Post Inspector.
To force a re-scrape for X (Twitter), copy-paste the relevant URL into the official X Card Validator.
The social crawlers still fail to crawl my site, despite being unblocked by my web host
There are two potential causes, namely:
Crawlers may fail if your HTTPS SSL certificate is invalid or misconfigured.
To determine whether your site's certificate is expired, and the chain is complete, copy-paste (or type) your website's URL into SSL Labs' SSL Server Test.
Crawlers may also fail when the social crawler user-agents are blocked by your site's robots.txt file.
Check your robots.txt for lines like:
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: /These prevent crawlers from accessing your site.
Update your robots.txt to permit them. For example:
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Allow: /
User-agent: LinkedInBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Twitterbot
Allow: /This ensures they can read your Open Graph tags.
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References
Facebook (2026) Sharing Debugger [Facebook for Developers] https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
LinkedIn Corporation (2026) Post Inspector [LinkedIn] https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/
The Open Graph Protocol (2010) OpenGraph Protocol [Open Graph Protocol] https://ogp.me/
X Corp (2026) X Card Validator [X Developer Platform] https://developer.x.com/en/docs/x-for-websites/cards/overview/player-card
YouTube (2024) What is the role of the Open graph tags and how does it affect SEO? [YouTube] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bat8HyGzkU8
For more information about OpenGraph, please visit ogp.me, Facebook Sharing Debugger or X Cards documentation; or run a search via Bing, DuckDuckGo or Google
📅 May 25, 2026
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