How to Test Link Previews Before Sharing
Sharing a link with a broken or embarrassing preview — wrong title, missing image, someone else's description — is easy to avoid. Testing takes less than a minute, and catching it before you share is far better than discovering it after.
-> Test any link now with TryUnfurl — free, no login
Why You Should Test Before Sharing
Link previews are generated from your page's metadata at the moment the link is first shared. If your metadata is wrong:
- The wrong image appears
- The wrong title is shown
- No preview card appears at all
- Different platforms show different (inconsistent) information
Platforms also cache previews — so a broken preview that gets shared at launch can stick around for hours or days, even after you fix the underlying metadata.
Testing first means you catch problems before they're visible to anyone.
Step-by-Step Testing Process
Step 1 — Check your page's metadata
View your page source (Ctrl+U or Cmd+U) and look in the <head> section for:
og:titleog:descriptionog:imagetwitter:card
If any are missing, add them before testing further. See the Open Graph tags guide for implementation details.
Step 2 — Test across all platforms at once
Paste your URL into TryUnfurl.com. It renders preview cards for Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, and iMessage simultaneously — showing you both the visual preview and the raw metadata values.
This is the fastest way to spot cross-platform inconsistencies: an image that works on Facebook but fails on Slack, or a title that's correct on most platforms but truncated on Twitter.
Step 3 — Check the raw metadata values
In TryUnfurl, look at the detected metadata underneath the preview cards:
- Is
og:titleunder 60 characters? - Is
og:descriptionunder 155 characters? - Does
og:imageload at the right URL? - Are
og:image:widthandog:image:heightdeclared?
Step 4 — Verify the image loads publicly
Open the og:image URL in a private/incognito browser window. If it doesn't load there, platform crawlers can't fetch it either.
Step 5 — Test the live deployed URL
Always test the actual live URL — not a localhost address or staging environment. Platform crawlers fetch pages from outside your network and need a publicly accessible URL with a valid domain and SSL certificate.
Step 6 — Test on specific platforms (optional)
For high-stakes shares, use platform-specific tools to validate:
| Platform | Testing tool |
|---|---|
| Sharing Debugger | |
| Twitter / X | Card Validator |
| Post Inspector | |
| Rich Results Test |
What to Look for When Testing
| Check | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Title | Correct, under 60 chars, not truncated |
| Description | Accurate, under 155 chars |
| Image | Correct image showing, not pixelated, not missing |
| Image size | 1200 × 630 px — anything smaller may be skipped |
| Consistency | Same info across all platforms |
| No fallback | Not reverting to generic <title> or page text |
Common Things Testing Catches
- og:image is a relative URL —
/images/og.jpginstead ofhttps://example.com/images/og.jpg - JavaScript-rendered tags — TryUnfurl shows empty metadata because the page uses client-side rendering without SSR
- Wrong page being previewed — a redirect is sending the crawler to a different URL than intended
- OG tags present but image too small — the tags exist but the image dimensions are below platform minimums
- Stale CDN cache — TryUnfurl shows old metadata because your CDN hasn't been purged since the last deploy
Test Your Link Now
Paste any URL into TryUnfurl.com to see exactly how it will look when shared — across every major platform, in under 30 seconds.