How link previews are built
When someone pastes a link into LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams or X, the platform fetches the page and reads its Open Graph tags — og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url and og:site_name — plus X's own twitter:card tags. If the tags are missing, the platform guesses, often picking a logo, a cookie banner text or nothing at all.
Professional firms are shared a lot in exactly these channels: a partner posts an article on LinkedIn, a client forwards your fee page to a colleague on WhatsApp. A clean card with a readable headline and an image of the right size looks credible; a blank grey box does not.
What we check
- Presence and length of og:title and og:description, with fallbacks to the title and meta description.
- The og:image: that it is an absolute https URL, that it loads and that it is served as an image (1200 × 630 pixels is the widely recommended size).
- og:url matching the canonical URL, and og:site_name.
- The twitter:card type, preferably summary_large_image for articles.
- Previews of the search snippet and the share card so you can see the truncation.
Fixing and refreshing previews
Most SEO plugins let you set a social title, description and image per page; set a sensible default image for pages without one. Keep key text away from the edges of the image, since some platforms crop it to a square or a narrower ratio. Use the og:image:alt tag to describe the image for screen-reader users.
Platforms cache previews. After changing tags, use LinkedIn's Post Inspector or Facebook's Sharing Debugger to fetch the page again; otherwise the old card may persist for days.
For articles and insights, write the social title as a headline rather than repeating the page title with your firm name. A specific, useful headline earns more clicks in a busy feed than a generic one.
Pages worth checking first
Start with the pages people actually share: your homepage, service pages, team profiles, articles and event pages. Partners' LinkedIn posts about a new article are often the largest single source of social visits for a firm, so make sure every article has its own image, a headline-style title and a short description that explains why it is worth reading.