When you share a link, the preview card comes from the destination page — its title, description, and image. If you do not own that page, you cannot change its card. There is a free workaround: a small share page that carries your preview and redirects to the destination.
Why previews belong to the destination
Social apps do not ask you what a link should look like. Their crawlers fetch the destination page and read its Open Graph tags: og:title, og:description, and og:image. If the page has good tags, the card looks good. If it has none, the app guesses — often badly. Website owners fix this by editing their own tags. Everyone else — affiliates, curators, people sharing a partner’s article — is stuck with whatever the page gives them.
The share-page workaround
Instead of sharing the destination directly, you share a page you control. That page holds the preview tags you want, and a meta refresh sends visitors to the destination the moment it loads. Crawlers read your tags and build your card; humans land on the real page. The card and the destination are both honest — the preview describes where the link goes, and the redirect goes there immediately.
Build one in five steps
- Open the cloaked link generator below. No account, no install.
- Paste the destination URL. This is where visitors land.
- Write the preview title. Keep it under about 60 characters so it is not cut off on most apps.
- Write one clear description sentence. Say what the visitor gets, not how clever the link is.
- Add an image URL. Use a wide image, 1200 by 630 pixels, under 8 MB for Facebook and under 600 KB if WhatsApp matters to you. Download the page, host it anywhere that serves static files, and share the page’s address.
Image and text rules that save your card
- 1200 × 630 pixels is the safe size for Facebook, LinkedIn, and X large cards.
- Absolute URLs only. The image address must start with https:// and be public — no login walls, no redirects the crawler will not follow.
- Title under 60 characters, description under about 160. Longer text gets cut mid-sentence on most apps.
- Match the preview to the destination. A card that promises one thing and delivers another is deceptive, and platforms treat it that way.
What if you do own the page?
Then skip the share page and set the tags on the page itself — it is simpler and more durable. On WordPress, your SEO plugin’s social tab sets og:title, og:description, and og:image per post. On other platforms, look for a social or sharing section in the page settings. The share-page method exists for the opposite case: pages you cannot edit. Use the direct method whenever you can, because a page’s own tags survive every share, cache refresh, and platform change without an extra redirect in the middle.
Test before you share widely
Build your preview tags, then check them with the social preview card generator: it shows mock cards for Facebook, X, and WhatsApp side by side, so a title that fits one app but gets cut on another is visible before anyone sees it. Remember the mocks are approximations, not the platforms’ real renderers — the final check is sharing the link once yourself.
The cache warning
Once a link has been shared, apps cache its card. Change the image later and old shares keep showing the old card until the cache expires or is refreshed. Plan the card before you publish, not after. If you must change a cached card, Facebook’s Sharing Debugger can force a re-scrape; WhatsApp has no official refresh, so a slightly changed URL (like adding ?v=2) is the usual workaround.