You just shipped a blog post. You paste the link into Slack, Twitter, or a WhatsApp group to share it — and the preview card shows a broken image, a blank title, or your homepage's generic description instead of the actual article summary.
This happens more often than it should, and almost always for the same reason: Open Graph (OG) tags are invisible until someone shares your link. You won't see the problem in your browser. You'll only see it in the wild, after the damage to your click-through rate is already done.
Why OG tags matter more than people think
Every time a link is shared on Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, or WhatsApp, the platform scrapes a specific set of <meta> tags from your page to build the preview card:
<meta property="og:title" content="Your Page Title" />
