og:image not showing on Facebook, Twitter/X or LinkedIn — how to fix it

You added an og:image, but the link preview is blank or wrong on Facebook, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or Slack. In almost every case it's one of five specific things — and the most common is that the image URL simply doesn't return HTTP 200. Here's how to find and fix it.

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1. The image URL 404s (most common)

Paste your page into the checker above. If it reports image_broken or image_unreachable, the URL in your og:image tag doesn't load. Open the exact image URL in a private browser tab — if it fails there, the crawler fails too.

2. You used a relative URL

Open Graph requires an absolute URL. <meta property="og:image" content="/img/card.png"> is wrong; it must be https://your-site.com/img/card.png.

3. The platform cached an old preview

Facebook, LinkedIn and X aggressively cache. After fixing the tag, re-scrape with the platform's debugger (Facebook Sharing Debugger, LinkedIn Post Inspector) to bust the cache.

4. Wrong dimensions or file type

Use a PNG or JPG at 1200×630. SVGs and tiny images are often ignored. Keep it under ~5 MB.

5. Blocked crawlers

If robots.txt or auth blocks the crawler, it can't fetch the image. Make the page and image publicly reachable.

Catch it automatically

Add OGCheck to CI so a broken preview fails your build before it ships:

python -m ogcheck https://your-site.com/page