Your og:image tag says 1200x630. The file might not.
Here’s a small thing I found on one of my own sites last week. The homepage of Aura++, a launch platform I run, has meta tags that say the share image is 1200 by 630 pixels. The actual file at that address is 1366 by 768.
Nobody would ever notice this by looking at the site. You only see it when the link gets pasted somewhere and the platform crops the image to its own shape. The tag is telling crawlers one thing and the file is another, and the crawler believes the file.
That’s the whole problem with link previews. They are the first thing most people see of your launch, and almost nobody looks at them until something already went out.
Where your launch link actually gets seen
On launch day you post the link on a launch board and maybe X. But a lot of the real sharing happens somewhere else. A friend drops it in a WhatsApp group. Someone pastes it in a Slack channel at work. A cofounder sends it on LinkedIn. In all of those places nobody sees your landing page first. They see a little card: an image, a title, maybe one line of description.
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If that card has no image, or a cut-off title, or your logo squashed into a corner, it looks like a dead link. People scroll past it. And you don’t get to fix it on the fly, because many of these apps cache the preview after the first time the link is shared.
What I found when I checked my own pages
On Oct 22 we ran a preview check on the 7 newest pages across my sites. Honest results:
- 1 page had no og:image at all. It’s a launch platform compare tool on Product Hunt Alternatives. I checked it again this morning (Oct 26) and it still has none, so a share of that page has no picture.
- 6 of the 7 page titles were over 60 characters, between 61 and 87. The compare tool page title is 67 characters today.
- The Aura++ share image is the one I opened with. Tags say 1200x630, the file is 1366x768. Still true this morning.
None of this broke the sites. All of it makes the shared link look worse than it should. And these are pages from someone who runs launch platforms for a living, so I’m guessing yours have a few of the same.
Three things I check before I share a launch link
1. Is there an image, and does it load?
Not “is there an og:image tag in the code”. Does the URL in that tag return an actual image, with a 200 response, from a public address? Images behind a login, on localhost, on a staging domain, or with a relative path are common reasons the card shows up blank. Open the image URL in a private window. If you can’t see it there, a crawler can’t either.
2. Is the image the size the tag claims?
1200x630 is the size most people use, roughly a 1.91 to 1 shape, and it’s what Facebook’s own guidance points to. If your real file is a different shape, each platform will crop it its own way and your text can get cut off at the edges. Keep anything important away from the edges anyway, and make sure the width and height tags match the real file. Mine didn’t.
3. Does the title survive being cut?
Long titles get trimmed in preview cards, same as in search results. Put the words that matter at the start, and the brand at the end where it can disappear safely. I wrote about how Google trims titles by pixels instead of characters, and the same idea applies here. Count width, not just letters.
You can check all three by hand with view-source and a private window. Or paste the URL into the free OG Image Checker on SideHunt, which is one of my sites. It previews the card for X, LinkedIn and Facebook, flags missing OG and Twitter tags, and checks the image itself, like whether it returns 200 and is 1200x630. No signup.
After you fix it, the old preview might still show
This is the part that catches people. You fix the image, share the link again, and the old broken card is still there. Platforms cache previews. LinkedIn has its Post Inspector and Facebook has the Sharing Debugger, and running your URL through them asks for a fresh scrape. Chat apps are less predictable, so the easiest fix is to check before the first share, not after.
A simple habit that works: the day before a launch, paste the link into a private chat with yourself on WhatsApp or Slack and look at it like a stranger would. Two minutes. If it looks bad there, it’ll look bad everywhere.
What I’m fixing
The compare tool page needs a share image. The Aura++ image needs to be exported at the size the tags say (or the tags changed to match). Titles I’m shortening as I touch each page, starting with the ones people actually share.
If you’re launching soon, run your own landing page through the OG image checker or just paste it into a chat with yourself. Then tell me in the comments: what was wrong with yours? I’m curious if the missing image or the wrong size is more common.
