How to Generate OG Images at Scale: A Developer's Guide
The link preview is the first thing people see before they click. On X, LinkedIn, Slack, and iMessage, your URL renders as a 1200×630 card — and if that card is a generic gray box with your domain name, you've already lost the click to the person who posted a screenshot instead.
Dynamic Open Graph images fix this. Instead of one static PNG per page, you render a unique card per URL — title, author, reading time, a chart, whatever your page actually contains. The result is a measurable lift in click-through rate and share velocity. But how you generate those images matters more than whether you do it at all. Get the architecture wrong and you'll ship broken cards, burn server resources, or lock yourself into a tool that can't scale.
Here's the landscape, the trade-offs, and a pipeline that holds up under real traffic.
The Landscape: Client-Side vs. Server-Side Rendering
