og:image file is too large

The limits are not the same everywhere

Facebook accepts up to 8 MB and LinkedIn up to 5 MB, which makes it easy to assume a heavy image is fine. WhatsApp is the constraint that actually bites: it needs the image to be small enough to fetch and render inline in a chat, and in practice anything much above 300 KB is unreliable.

Because WhatsApp is often where links get shared one-to-one, a card that works everywhere except there is a card that fails at exactly the moment someone is recommending you personally.

Aim for under 1 MB, ideally under 300 KB

Under 1 MB clears every platform's hard limit with room to spare. Under 300 KB clears WhatsApp too. A well-compressed 1200 × 630 image lands comfortably under 200 KB in most cases, so this is usually achievable without any visible quality cost.

Crawler timeouts are the other reason to care. A slow fetch on a cold CDN edge can exceed the crawler's patience, and a timeout produces a card with no image at all rather than a card with a slow image.

How to get the size down

Choose the format by content. Photographs compress far better as JPEG at quality 80 to 85 than as PNG. Flat graphics with text and solid colours are the opposite — PNG-8 with a reduced palette will beat JPEG both on size and on how crisp the text looks.

Do not export at 2400 pixels wide expecting to serve retina. Social platforms scale the image themselves, and 1200 wide is already the size they design around.

WebP is well supported by the major crawlers now, but it is still the format most likely to be dropped by a smaller platform or an in-house link unfurler. If you need maximum compatibility, stay on JPEG or PNG.

Frequently asked