OGPreview.io

Facebook link preview checker

See the card Facebook will build from your page, with the same fallbacks its crawler uses, before you post. No login, unlike Meta’s Sharing Debugger.

Why old previews stick: step through Facebook’s cache

Your pageold-image.png
Facebook cacheold-image.png

Someone shares /launch. Facebook’s crawler fetches the page, reads the og: tags, downloads the image and stores the card.

What Facebook reads

Facebook’s crawler (it identifies itself as facebookexternalhit) downloads the raw HTML of your page and reads only the <head>. It does not run your JavaScript, so tags injected by a client-side framework after load are invisible to it.

  • og:title: the bold headline. Falls back to <title>.
  • og:description: one line under the title. Falls back to the meta description.
  • og:image: the picture. Use 1200×630 (1.91:1). Below 600px wide you get a small square thumbnail instead of the large card.
  • og:url: the canonical address. Likes and shares are counted against this URL.
  • og:type and og:site_name: context that Facebook uses in some layouts.

When to use Meta’s Sharing Debugger too

This checker shows what your page says right now. Meta’s own Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) shows what Facebook has cached and lets you press “Scrape Again” to refresh it. Use ours to get the tags right, then use Meta’s tool once to push the update into Facebook’s cache. WhatsApp and Instagram DMs use the same Meta crawler, so a fix shows up there too.

Frequently asked questions

Why is Facebook still showing my old image?

Facebook caches the scraped preview for each URL, typically for about 30 days. After you fix your tags, open Meta’s Sharing Debugger, paste the URL and press “Scrape Again”. Changing the image file name (or adding a version query like ?v=2) also forces a fresh download.

Why does Facebook show no image at all?

The most common causes are: no og:image tag, a relative image URL, an image smaller than 200×200, an image blocked by robots.txt or a firewall that rejects bots, or an image over 8 MB. The checker above tests each of these.

Do I need fb:app_id?

No. The Sharing Debugger lists it as a warning, but it only matters if you use Facebook Insights for your domain. Previews work without it.

What image size does Facebook use?

1200×630 pixels, a 1.91:1 ratio. Facebook recommends at least 1080px wide for high-resolution screens, and declaring og:image:width and og:image:height so the image renders on the very first share.

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