Why does my link look wrong when shared on WhatsApp or Facebook?
When someone shares your link, the app builds a preview card from Open Graph tags in the page: the title, a description and, most importantly, an image. Without them you get a bare link or a random picture from the page. Set a title, a description and a 1200 by 630 pixel image for every page, and most SEO plugins add the tags for you.
Why it matters
A link with a good preview gets clicked; a bare link looks like spam. When a happy customer shares your site in a WhatsApp group or a local Facebook group, the card is your advert to everyone in it. If the image is a stray icon and the title is "Home", the recommendation is wasted. The same tags drive previews in Messenger, LinkedIn, Slack, Teams, iMessage and most other apps, and Twitter or X uses a near-identical set.
The tags that matter
- og:title, the headline on the card; usually the same as the page title.
- og:description, one or two sentences below it.
- og:image, the picture; 1200 by 630 pixels, under 1 MB, with the important content in the middle because some apps crop to a square.
- og:url, the canonical address of the page.
How to check
Our check looks for the og:title, og:description and og:image tags on your home page. Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector show exactly what each network will display, and let you refresh their cached copy after you make changes.
How to fix it
On WordPress, SEO plugins such as Yoast and Rank Math add the tags to every page, with a site-wide default image and a per-page override. Set the default to a well-cropped photo or your logo on a coloured background, then give your key pages their own image. On other platforms look for "social sharing" or "social image" in the page settings. After changing an image, use the debugger tools to clear the networks' cached preview.
Not sure how your own site does on this? Run the free check: it takes about twenty seconds and reports on this and thirty other things.