Every time someone shares your URL on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or WhatsApp, Open Graph tags determine what appears in the preview card. A good preview — compelling title, clear description, quality image — dramatically increases click-through rates from social shares.

Yet many sites have missing, incomplete, or incorrect Open Graph tags. This is a fixable problem that has real impact on the traffic you get from every share of your content.

What Are Open Graph Tags?

Open Graph is a protocol developed by Facebook and now used across all major social platforms and messaging apps. It uses meta tags in your page's to define how the page should be represented when shared.

The four essential OG tags are:

``html `

og:title

The title displayed in the share card. This doesn't have to be identical to your HTML title tag — it's often useful to write a more social-media-optimised version that works without the brand suffix.

Best practice: 60-90 characters, engaging and specific.

og:description

The description shown beneath the title in the share card. Unlike meta descriptions (which have a soft limit of 160 characters), social cards display roughly 200-300 characters depending on the platform.

Write something that compels a click — explain what the reader will learn or gain from the page.

og:image

The image displayed in the preview card. This is the most visually dominant element and has the biggest impact on click-through rates. Requirements: - Minimum 1200x630 pixels (for high-resolution display) - JPG or PNG format - Under 8MB (practically, keep it under 1MB) - Must be an absolute URL (not a relative path) - Must be publicly accessible (not behind login or on localhost)

Branded templates with the article title overlaid on a consistent background are highly effective — they make your content immediately recognisable in social feeds.

og:type

Defines the type of content. Common values are website (default), article (for blog posts), and product. Using article for blog posts enables additional article-specific properties.

og:url

Should be the canonical URL of the page. This helps prevent duplicate content issues when the same content is accessible from multiple URLs.

Twitter Card Tags

Twitter has its own meta tags (now X, but the tags remain the same) that work independently of Open Graph:

`html ` summary_large_image displays your image in a large format. summary shows a small thumbnail. Always use summary_large_image` for content pages — it significantly increases engagement.

Dynamic OG Tags

For sites with many pages (e-commerce, blogs, news), hardcoding OG tags on every page isn't practical. Use your CMS or server-side rendering to generate OG tags dynamically from your page data.

WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math generate OG tags automatically. For custom sites, template your meta tags to pull from page title, description, and featured image fields.

Auditing Your Social Tags

Use a social preview tester to check every important page on your site. Look for: - Missing required tags (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url) - Images that are too small (under 1200x630) - Image URLs that return 404 - Titles that are too long or too short - Generic descriptions that don't relate to the specific page

Fix your highest-traffic and most-shared pages first, then work through the rest. Even if you never actively share a page, others might — and when they do, you want the preview to be as compelling as possible.