You've just published a brilliant blog post. Someone shares it on LinkedIn. And what appears? A broken image, a truncated title, and a description that's been auto-pulled from some random paragraph on the page. Instead of looking professional and click-worthy, your shared link looks like spam. All because of a few missing meta tags that would have taken five minutes to set up.

Open Graph (OG) tags are snippets of code in your website's HTML that tell social media platforms exactly how to display your content when someone shares a link. They control the title, description, image, and URL that appear in that social sharing preview card — and they're one of the most overlooked elements of web design for Irish businesses.

This guide explains what OG tags are, how to set them up properly, and how to make sure every page on your website looks fantastic when shared across Facebook, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), WhatsApp, and other platforms.

Open Graph is a protocol originally created by Facebook that allows web pages to become rich objects in a social graph. In practical terms, it's a set of meta tags you add to the head section of your HTML that tell social platforms what title, image, description, and URL to display when your page is shared.

Without OG tags, social platforms will try to guess what to display — pulling a random image from the page, using the page title (which might be cut off), and grabbing whatever text they can find for the description. The results are almost always poor. With properly configured OG tags, you control exactly what appears, ensuring every share of your content looks professional and compelling.

The core OG tags are: og:title (the title shown in the share card), og:description (the description text), og:image (the image displayed), og:url (the canonical URL), and og:type (typically 'website' for homepages or 'article' for blog posts). These five tags cover the basics for most platforms.

Think about how often links are shared in your industry. Clients sharing your work on their social profiles. Partners tagging you in posts. Your own social media marketing. Team members sharing blog posts on LinkedIn. Every one of these shares is a mini-advert for your business, and the quality of the sharing preview directly affects whether people click through.

A well-crafted sharing preview with a compelling image, clear title, and descriptive text gets significantly more clicks than a broken or generic preview. It's essentially free advertising that you're either making the most of or completely wasting, depending on whether you've set up your OG tags.

For Irish businesses active on LinkedIn (which is most B2B companies), this is particularly important. LinkedIn's feed is heavy on shared links, and the visual quality of your sharing preview directly affects engagement. A professional-looking share card builds credibility. A broken one undermines it.

The implementation depends on your platform. In WordPress, plugins like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or All in One SEO handle OG tags automatically and let you customise them per page. Shopify generates basic OG tags from your product and page details. Squarespace includes them by default. Most modern CMS platforms have built-in OG tag support or plugins that add it.

For each page, you should set a specific og:title that's compelling and clear (this can differ from your page's HTML title), an og:description that summarises the page content in 1-2 sentences, and an og:image that's specifically designed or selected for social sharing. Don't just let the system pull whatever it finds — be intentional about each element.

The og:image is the most impactful OG tag because humans are visual creatures — the image is what catches the eye in a busy social feed. Getting it right is worth the effort.

The recommended image size is 1200 x 630 pixels for Facebook and LinkedIn (1.91:1 ratio). This size works well across most platforms. For X/Twitter, the recommended size is 1200 x 675 pixels (16:9 ratio) using Twitter Card meta tags (which we'll cover shortly). If you can only create one image, 1200 x 630 works reasonably well everywhere.

Your OG image should be visually compelling at a small size — remember, it'll appear as a thumbnail in most feeds. Bold, simple designs with minimal text work best. If you include text on the image, keep it large and readable. Avoid images with important details at the edges, as some platforms crop differently. And always use high-quality images — a blurry or pixelated sharing preview looks unprofessional.

For blog posts, consider creating a branded template that includes the article title and your logo. This gives every shared article a consistent, professional look while clearly identifying the content as yours. Tools like Canva make it easy to create these templates.

X (formerly Twitter) uses its own set of meta tags called Twitter Cards, though it also falls back to OG tags if Twitter-specific tags aren't present. The key Twitter Card tags are: twitter:card (set to 'summary_large_image' for the best visual impact), twitter:title, twitter:description, and twitter:image.

If you're setting up both OG tags and Twitter Cards, you can often point the Twitter tags to the same values as your OG tags. Most SEO plugins handle this automatically. The main difference is the twitter:card tag, which controls the display format — 'summary_large_image' gives you the large image preview, while 'summary' gives a smaller thumbnail alongside text.

Facebook reads OG tags directly and caches them aggressively. If you update your OG tags and the old preview still shows on Facebook, use the Facebook Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) to clear the cache and force a refresh.

LinkedIn also reads OG tags and caches previews. Use the LinkedIn Post Inspector (linkedin.com/post-inspector/) to preview how your link will appear and refresh cached data. LinkedIn is particularly important for B2B Irish businesses, so always check how your key pages appear here.

WhatsApp reads OG tags to generate link previews in chat. This is often overlooked but matters hugely — think about how often links are shared in WhatsApp groups and conversations. A good OG image and title make your link stand out among the stream of messages.

iMessage and SMS also generate link previews using OG tags. These previews appear when someone shares a link via text message, making OG tags important even beyond social media.

The most common mistake is simply not having OG tags at all, leaving platforms to guess. The second is having a generic OG image (usually the site logo) that's the same for every page, rather than page-specific images. Third is using OG titles that are too long — they get truncated after about 60-70 characters on most platforms. Fourth is forgetting to update OG tags when page content changes, leading to outdated previews being shared.

Another frequent issue is OG images that are too small, too large, or in an unsupported format. Use JPEG or PNG (not SVG or WebP, as some platforms don't support them for OG images), keep the file size under 5MB, and stick to the recommended 1200 x 630 pixel dimensions.

Always test your OG tags before sharing important content. The tools you need are all free: Facebook Sharing Debugger for Facebook previews, LinkedIn Post Inspector for LinkedIn previews, and the Twitter Card Validator for X previews. These tools show you exactly what your share card will look like and flag any issues with your tags.

Make testing part of your publishing workflow. Before promoting a new blog post or page, run it through these debuggers to ensure the preview looks right. It takes less than a minute and prevents the embarrassment of sharing a broken preview to your professional network.

Open Graph tags are a small technical detail with an outsized impact on how your business appears across the web. Every time someone shares your content — on social media, in messaging apps, in emails that generate previews — your OG tags determine whether that share looks professional and compelling or broken and forgettable. Set them up properly once, make them part of your publishing process, and every share of your content becomes a polished, click-worthy advert for your business.