Link Preview Checker

When you paste a link into WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack or a social network, the app quickly visits the page and shows a small card with a picture, a title and a short description. The page itself decides what goes on that card, with a few hidden lines in its code.

Mostly five so-called Open Graph tags in the page’s code. If you build your own site, these are the ones to fill in:

• Title (og:title): the headline, best under about 60 characters
• Description (og:description): one or two lines below the title, up to about 150 characters
• Image (og:image): the picture: 1200 × 630 px, JPEG or PNG, under 600 KB, with a full https:// address
• Address (og:url): the main address of the page
• Card type (twitter:card): “summary_large_image”, so X shows the large picture

Then every app helps itself in its own way. WhatsApp and iMessage show the site icon, Facebook and Google a picture from the page, and Slack, Telegram, LinkedIn and X often show no picture at all. Which picture ends up in the preview is then a matter of luck: a logo, a banner or a product photo. With an og:image, you decide.

1200 × 630 pixels (about 2:1) as JPEG or PNG, under about 600 KB. Smaller images are often shown as a tiny thumbnail, and very large files are skipped by some apps, WhatsApp among them. Keep the important part in the middle: some apps crop the image to a square.

Google picks a picture for the search result by itself and shows it as a small square next to the text. If the page only has a wide preview image, Google fits it into the square, with empty space above and below. A page can suggest a better picture for Google in its structured data (schema.org “primaryImageOfPage”), for example a square version of the preview image. Chat apps keep using the og:image.

That is the site icon (favicon), the same one you see in the browser tab. Google and Slack show it next to the site name. A square PNG or SVG of at least 48 × 48 pixels looks sharp everywhere.

Apps keep a preview once they have loaded it, sometimes for days. Facebook and LinkedIn have their own tools to load a page again (Sharing Debugger, Post Inspector). In chat apps it usually helps to share a slightly different address, or a new short link.

Flipp the link: Flippto gives any link a preview image you design yourself, without touching the website. People still land on the original page when they open it.

Yes, free and without an account. We load the page and its preview image on our server and do not store the results.