OG Images: Why Your Links Look Terrible When Shared on Social Media

You share your website link on LinkedIn or Facebook and it shows up as plain text with no image. Meanwhile your competitor’s link shows a beautiful branded preview. The difference is one simple meta tag called og:image.

What is an OG image?

OG stands for Open Graph, a protocol that Facebook created and every social platform now uses. When someone shares a link, the platform looks for og:image, og:title, and og:description meta tags in your HTML. If they are missing, the platform either shows nothing or guesses (usually badly).

Why it matters

Posts with images get 2 to 3 times more engagement than posts without. On LinkedIn, a branded preview image makes you look professional and established. Plain text links look like spam.

How to fix it

Create a branded image at 1200 x 630 pixels. This could be your logo on a branded background, a photo of your product, or a tagline graphic. In WordPress with Rank Math, go to any page, click the Social tab, and upload the image. For Shopify, it is under Online Store settings. Test afterwards by pasting your URL into LinkedIn’s Post Inspector tool or Facebook’s Sharing Debugger.

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