Troubleshooting
Why your social link preview is missing or outdated
A step-by-step checklist for debugging missing images, wrong titles, redirects and stale social link previews.
Ogserve · 5 min read
Separate the published page from the cached preview
A correct page and an old preview can exist at the same time. Start by checking what your published URL returns now. If the returned tags are still wrong, fix the website first. If the tags are correct, investigate the destination app and its cached copy.
A preview tool is a diagnostic aid, not proof that every social network can fetch your page. Your browser, the checker and the destination crawler can receive different responses because of access rules, location, user agents or caching.
Check the page and image independently
The page can load successfully while its image fails. Inspect the final image URL, not only the page URL. An expired signed URL, a protected asset or an image response with the wrong content type can leave a card without artwork.
- Open the exact published URL and follow its redirects.
- Look for og:title, og:image, og:type and og:url in the returned HTML head.
- Check that the image is reachable without signing in and that its URL stays valid.
- Review robots and firewall rules for the destination crawler.
- Check each route separately; a working home page does not prove an article template works.
Watch for conflicting or late metadata
Framework defaults, SEO plugins and shared layouts can all emit tags. If two components write different og:title or og:image values, remove the conflict at its source. Repeated values are not always an error, but order matters when an image list is intentional.
Prefer metadata in the HTML response that the server or build produces. The checker reads that response; it does not execute the page’s JavaScript. If you see the right tags only in your browser’s live Elements panel, compare them with the original response.
Recheck after deployment
Publish the correction, inspect again and compare the resolved page and image URLs. If a CDN still serves the old response, refresh that cache using your hosting provider’s controls. Then use the destination platform’s own debugging or refresh tools where available.
Do not promise an exact refresh time. Platforms control their own caches, and users may be looking at messages created before the change. Share the canonical URL in a new test message and compare the result with the tags served today.