Link Preview Checker
See the card WhatsApp, LinkedIn and X will build from your page, checked against each platform's published rules, before anyone shares the link.
What this tool does
It reads your page the way the apps do and shows you the card they will build from it. We ask for the page twice, once as WhatsApp and once as Meta’s crawler, pull the Open Graph tags out of the <head>, fetch the image, and check all of it against the rules WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Meta publish.
Run it before the link goes out, because the first share is the one you control. Meta caches a preview image against the URL, and LinkedIn’s refresh tool only reaches posts made after you use it. Fix a tag once the link is out and the cards already posted keep the old version.
How to use it
- Paste the URL of the page you’re about to share, and don’t stop at the homepage. Each page carries its own tags, so each one can fail in its own way.
- Read the problems first. They are documented requirements your page misses, listed ahead of everything that passed. An access problem outranks the rest: if WhatsApp is turned away at the door, the tags behind it never get read.
- Fix, then run it again. Nothing is cached on our side, so a second run reads the page as it stands now.
- Send yourself the link before anyone else does. Our cards are close, but each app draws its own, and your phone is the only screen that shows exactly what WhatsApp does.
How it works
We request your page with the user agent WhatsApp documents and the one Meta’s crawler sends, then read the HTML that comes back. That is the same HTML the apps get, which is the point. Tags a script writes in after the page loads are not in it, and they are not in what WhatsApp reads either.
If either crawler is refused, we ask again as an ordinary browser. A browser getting through where WhatsApp does not means something in front of your site is filtering on user agent. One caveat, and it is a real one: some firewalls also check that a request claiming to be Meta comes from Meta’s own network. Ours does not, so a firewall doing that will refuse us and still let the real crawler in. Treat a refusal as the cue to send yourself the link before you touch a firewall rule.
The limits come from each platform’s own documentation. WhatsApp wants the <head> inside the first 300 KB of the HTML, a description that fits in about 80 characters, and an image under 600 KB, at least 300 pixels wide and no wider than 4:1. LinkedIn sets a floor of 1200 × 627. Where a platform only recommends, as Meta does with 1200 × 630 and a 1.91:1 ratio, we list it as worth tidying and keep the problems for what is required.
What we cannot tell you is how long an app holds on to an old card. None of the three say, and the durations you’ll read elsewhere come from blog posts. The reasoning behind every check here, including what a bilingual site owes its second set of tags, is in Social sharing.
Standing offer
The hard part is deciding what to do first
Bring us a URL, an audit report, or a proposal you're not sure about. We'll tell you which problems deserve budget this quarter, and you'll leave with an order of operations you can hand to whoever does the work, whether that's us or not.
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