How to debug your Facebook link preview
- 1
Paste your URL
Any public page. We fetch it and read every
og:tag in its head, plus the title and description Facebook falls back to. - 2
See the Facebook post
The result opens on the Facebook preview: the large card, the small square thumbnail, or no image at all, depending on your
og:image. - 3
Fix what's flagged
Each problem links to a plain-English fix, with the exact tag to add. Re-run the check to confirm it is live.
How this compares with Meta's Sharing Debugger
Meta's own Sharing Debugger at developers.facebook.com/tools/debug needs you to sign in to Facebook. It is also the only way to make Facebook fetch your page again, with its Scrape Again button, so keep it for that last step.
This checker needs no account and is not affiliated with Meta. It shows the same preview, lists each tag it read, explains every problem it finds, and previews X, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Discord from the same scan.
The tags Facebook reads, and what it falls back to
Facebook builds the preview from Open Graph tags, and Meta lists og:url, og:type, og:title, og:description and og:image as the core set. When one is missing, Meta says its crawler uses internal heuristics to make a best guess, which is often a logo, a cookie banner or the wrong photo.
| Tag | Falls back to | Notes |
|---|---|---|
og:title | <title> | The bold headline. Keep it under about 60 characters. |
og:description | A guess from the page | The line under the title. Often cut short on mobile. |
og:image | An image guessed from the page | At least 1200 × 630 for the large card; under 8 MB. Use an absolute HTTPS URL. |
og:url | The shared URL | The canonical URL. Shares and reactions are counted against it. |
og:image:width | None | With og:image:height, lets Facebook lay out the first share before it downloads the image. |
<meta property="og:title" content="Your page title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="One or two sentences." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og.png" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page" />Facebook image size
Meta recommends at least 1200 × 630 pixels, as close to 1.91:1 as possible so the feed shows the whole image without cropping. Below 600 × 315 the image still shows, but in a much smaller layout, and 200 × 200 is the smallest Facebook accepts. The file must be under 8 MB.
Facebook has to download the image before it can show it, so the first share of a new page can appear without one. Declaring og:image:width and og:image:height, or running the URL through Meta's Sharing Debugger, lets Facebook render it straight away.
Need an image at the right size? Create one with the free OG image generator and download a ready 1200 × 630 PNG.