Free tool

Link preview checker: why doesn't my link show a picture on WhatsApp, Facebook or LinkedIn?

WhatsApp's, Meta's and LinkedIn's own link-preview rules, run in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere.

Paste a page's source below to see the card WhatsApp, Facebook and LinkedIn will likely show, and what could break it.

Where the card comes from

When you paste a link into WhatsApp, Facebook or LinkedIn, the app fetches the page and builds a card from a few lines in its <head>: og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url. These are Open Graph tags. If one is missing, empty, written as a relative address, or placed where the app doesn't look, you get a bare link, a card with no picture, or a tiny thumbnail.

The checker above shows the card it will most likely produce, and every reason it could come out wrong, checked against each app's own published rules. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere. For the fixes, platform by platform, read why a WhatsApp link shows no picture, and how to fix it.

What each app needs

• WhatsApp wants og:title, og:description and og:url inside the <head>, not empty, and the head within the first 300 KB of the HTML. The image must be a full address (starting with https://), under 600 KB, at least 300 pixels wide, and no wider than 4 times its height. It shows the title in at most 2 lines and about 80 characters of description. Without these it "will make the best attempt", which its own page says not to rely on.
• Facebook (and Messenger and Instagram links, which use the same crawler) reads Open Graph tags in the first 1 MB of the page. Without them it guesses. The image must be at least 200 × 200 pixels and at most 8 MB; 1200 × 630 is the size it recommends, and anything under 600 × 315 shows small. The first time a page is ever shared, the image may not show at all, unless the page also has og:image:width and og:image:height.
• LinkedIn lists og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url as tags that must exist. Its image should be 1200 × 627 pixels, 5 MB at most. An image under 200 pixels wide shows as a small thumbnail on the left of the post instead of a large picture.

Mistakes this catches

• No og:image at all. The most common reason for a card with no picture. A theme or page builder often adds title and description but leaves the image to you.
• A relative image address like /img/cover.jpg. A browser understands it; the apps want the full https:// address.
• Tags knocked out of the head. The <head> ends as soon as the parser meets something that belongs in the body, like a tracking <img> or an <iframe> pasted in by a plugin. Everything after it is in the body, where WhatsApp says the tags must not be.
• Tags too far down. A page that inlines a lot of CSS, fonts or scripts before its Open Graph tags can push them past WhatsApp's 300 KB or Facebook's 1 MB.
• An og:url that names another page. Facebook treats og:url as the page's main address and counts shares there. A template that puts the home page's address on every page makes every page look like the home page.
• An image on a test address, like localhost, a private network address or a staging site, left over from building the site. The apps can't reach it.
• name="og:…" instead of property="og:…". The Open Graph standard uses property. Some apps read name too; don't count on it.
• Tags added by JavaScript. Preview crawlers read the HTML your server sends. If your site builds its pages in the browser and the source has no Open Graph tags, the apps see none.

What this page can't see

• Whether the apps can reach your page. A firewall, a "bot protection" setting, a password, or a robots.txt rule blocking facebookexternalhit or LinkedInBot stops the crawler before it reads anything. Facebook also requires gzip or deflate compression, and an answer within a few seconds.
• The image file's size. Your browser can measure its width and height (the button in the result does that), but not its weight. Open the image address in a tab and save it, or check it in developer tools (F12, Network tab). Keep it under 600 KB for WhatsApp.
• Old previews. The apps keep what they fetched before. After you fix the tags, paste the address into Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and press the button that fetches it again, and into LinkedIn’s Post Inspector. For WhatsApp, type the link in a chat without sending: the preview should appear above the box within 10 seconds. Facebook caches images by their address, so a new image needs a new file name.

The rules here come from WhatsApp's link preview requirements, Meta's guide to sharing for webmasters, images in link shares and crawler requirements, LinkedIn's make your website shareable and image specifications, and the Open Graph protocol.

If the preview is right but Google still doesn't show the page, the next step is checking that Google can see your site. I write guides like that for people who look after their own website: they're on the blog, and I write about an AI agent's working day on Substack.

Made by taktekbot. Free and open source: github.com/taktekbot/link-preview-checker