Skip to content
SERPCompass

Open Graph and Twitter/X card tags that are missing

Put Open Graph meta tags in the head of every page: og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url, which the Open Graph protocol requires, plus og:description. Then add a twitter:card tag set to summary_large_image. X reads the Open Graph title, description and image when its own tags are missing, but without twitter:card it may show only a small card. Most SEO plugins and site builders write them from your settings.

Last updated 28 October 2026, when every step was checked against the vendor's documentation.

Why it matters

When someone pastes your link into a social app or a chat, the app fetches the page and reads its Open Graph tags to build the preview: a title, a short description and an image. Meta says that without them its crawler uses internal heuristics to make a best guess at all three, and Webflow's help centre warns that random content, or none, may appear. LinkedIn's help centre lists og:title, og:image, og:description and og:url as the tags a page needs before it can be shared properly there.

X builds its link cards from twitter: tags. When twitter:title, twitter:description or twitter:image is missing, X falls back to og:title, og:description or og:image, so one set of Open Graph tags serves both. The card type is the exception: X's documentation says only that when og:type, og:title and og:description exist but twitter:card is absent, a summary card, the small one, may be rendered. twitter:card set to summary_large_image asks for the large image.

Search engines read some of these tags too. Google lists og:title among the sources it may use for a result's title link, and says an og:image (or schema.org markup) can influence which image Google Discover shows for the page. Google documents no ranking role for them; their main job is the preview people see before they decide to click.

SERPCompass flags a page as having incomplete Open Graph tags when og:title or og:image is missing or empty, because those two make the preview, and as missing an X card when it has no twitter:card tag. Pages marked noindex are skipped. The full set we recommend is og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url, plus og:type, which the Open Graph protocol also requires.

The audit findings this guide fixes: Incomplete Open Graph tags; Missing Twitter/X card.

Find every page with this problem

Run the free scan on your domain. It checks these tags on every page it crawls: the result shows your most urgent findings and counts the rest, and the Gap Report and a SERPCompass workspace list every page that lacks them. To check one page by hand, view its source and search for og: and twitter:card: each tag should appear once, inside the <head>, with a non-empty content. Meta's Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/) shows which tags its crawler reads from a URL, with any errors or warnings.

Scan my site free

How to fix it on your platform

WordPress sites with neither Yoast SEO nor Rank Math, and the extra Open Graph properties for products, articles and video, are not covered here.

WordPress with Yoast SEO

  1. In the Yoast SEO menu, click Settings and, under Site features, go to Social sharing. Check that Open Graph data and X card data are switched on (Yoast turns both on by default) and click Save changes if you changed anything.
  2. Set a fallback image: in Settings, open Site basics and add a Site image under Site info, then save. Yoast uses it for posts and pages that have no image of their own.
  3. To choose the preview for one post or page, open it in the editor, open the Yoast SEO sidebar at the top right and click Social media appearance.
  4. Set the image, title and description. To show X something different, set the X image, title and description in the same Social media appearance section.
  5. Update the post or page.
  6. For a product, category or tag, open its editor and use the Social tab in the Yoast meta box below the text editor instead.
  7. If your homepage shows your latest posts, set its image, title and description in Settings > Content types > Homepage, under Social appearance, and click Save changes. A static homepage is a page: use the sidebar as above.

Sources: How to add Facebook's Open Graph meta tags (Yoast); How to activate X Cards in Yoast SEO (Yoast); Yoast SEO settings: Site basics (Yoast); How to customize your Facebook appearance with Open Graph meta tags (Yoast); How to customize your appearance on X (Yoast); Social media optimization with Yoast SEO (Yoast).

WordPress with Rank Math

  1. Open the post or page in the editor, click the Rank Math icon at the top right of the screen and open the Social tab.
  2. On the Facebook tab, click Add Image and choose the image. Type a title and description, or leave them empty to use the SEO title and meta description from the General tab.
  3. On the Twitter tab, leave Use Data from Facebook Tab on (it is on by default) to reuse those values for X, or turn it off to give X its own image, title and description.
  4. Choose the Card Type on the Twitter tab. Rank Math recommends Summary Card with Large Image for blog posts.
  5. Update the post or page.
  6. To set defaults for the whole site, open Rank Math's Titles and Meta settings and, under Global Meta, add an OpenGraph Thumbnail (used when a post has no featured image or social image of its own) and choose the default Twitter Card Type. Click Save Changes.

Sources: General tab in the meta box (Rank Math); Social media options in Rank Math (Rank Math); Titles and Meta options and settings (Rank Math).

Shopify

  1. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Preferences. In the Social sharing image and SEO section, click Add image (or Change image), choose the image and click Save. Pages without a featured image of their own, such as the home page, use it.
  2. Give every product, collection and blog post a featured image: Shopify's free themes show the featured image when that page is shared.
  3. Fill in each page's search engine listing (page title and meta description). Shopify's own Dawn theme writes og:title and og:description from these, falling back to the store's name and description.
  4. If your theme has its own social sharing image setting, check that too: some themes show only the image from their own settings, and an image set in the theme wins over the one in Preferences.
  5. If the scan still reports missing tags, compare your theme with Dawn, which writes the Open Graph tags and twitter:card from its snippets/meta-tags.liquid file inside the page's <head>. Shopify adds og:image itself when a theme has none, but ask your theme's developer to add the rest.

Sources: Choosing a social media image (Shopify Help Center); Adding keywords for SEO to your Shopify store (Shopify Help Center); Dawn theme: snippets/meta-tags.liquid (Shopify on GitHub); Liquid objects: page_image (Shopify developer docs).

Wix

  1. In the editor, click Pages & Menu on the left, hover over the page, click the More Actions icon and choose Social share.
  2. Click Upload Image, select or upload the image and click Add to Page.
  3. Change the shared title and description there if you want: by default Wix uses the page's SEO title and meta description.
  4. Click X Settings in the same panel to choose the card size shown on X and, if you want, a separate image, title and description for X.
  5. Publish your site.
  6. To give every page without its own image a fallback, open your site's settings, click Website settings under Site and Domain, upload a General social image, click Save and publish again.
  7. To set rules for a whole page type, such as every product, go to SEO & GEO in your dashboard, click SEO Settings under Tools and settings, choose the page type, click Edit next to Basics & social share and edit the Social share and X (Twitter) sections. Click Save.

Sources: Wix Editor: Changing your og:image (Wix Help Center); Customizing the social share settings for your site's pages (Wix Help Center); Customizing the X (Twitter) settings for your site's pages (Wix Help Center).

Squarespace

  1. Add a social sharing logo: open the Social sharing panel in your site's settings, click + to upload an image (or drag one in) and click Save. Pages and items without an image of their own fall back to it.
  2. For a page, open the Pages panel, hover over the page and click the gear icon. Open the Social tab, upload an image and click Save. Do this on a computer: the Squarespace app cannot add it.
  3. For a blog post or event, hover over it and click Edit; for a product, double-click it. Then use its Social tab the same way.
  4. Facebook and X show each page's SEO title and SEO description, so fill those in on the SEO tab of the same settings.
  5. Remove any site or page password before you test: Squarespace says X cards do not work while a password is enabled.

Sources: Add social sharing images (Squarespace Help Center); How content displays in social posts (Squarespace Help Center); Editing page titles (Squarespace Help Center); Using X with Squarespace (Squarespace Help Center).

Webflow

  1. In the Designer, open the Pages panel, open the page's Page settings and go to Open Graph settings.
  2. Type the Open Graph title and description, or tick the box below each field to use the page's SEO title and meta description.
  3. Add the image: click Select image to choose a JPG or PNG from your assets, or Add URL to paste a public link to an image file, then click Save. Webflow does not support AVIF or WebP Open Graph images.
  4. Repeat for every page: Webflow has no site-wide Open Graph setting. On a Collection template page, choose an Image field of the Collection in the Open Graph image dropdown so each item gets its own image.
  5. Publish your site.
  6. View the published page's source. If it has no twitter:card tag, add <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> in Site settings, on the Custom code tab, in Head code, and publish again. Custom code needs a paid Site plan or a paid Workspace.

Sources: Control the look of social shares with Open Graph (Webflow Help Center); Custom code in head and body tags (Webflow Help Center); Getting started with Cards (X Developer Platform, archived February 2026).

Plain HTML

  1. Inside the <head> of every page, add og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url, each as a <meta property="..." content="..."> tag, plus og:description.
  2. Use full addresses starting with https:// for og:image and og:url. The protocol defines a URL value as one using http:// or https://, and og:url is the page's canonical URL.
  3. Add og:image:width, og:image:height and og:image:alt. Meta says the width and height let its crawler render the image immediately, without downloading and processing it first.
  4. Add <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">. Add twitter:title, twitter:description or twitter:image only when X should show something different from the Open Graph values.
  5. If your pages share a template, fill these values from each page's own title, description and image rather than printing the same tags on every page.
  6. Let the preview crawlers in: X's crawler, Twitterbot, follows robots.txt and shows no card for a blocked page and no image for a blocked image.

Sources: The Open Graph protocol (ogp.me); Images in link shares (Meta for Developers); Getting started with Cards (X Developer Platform, archived February 2026); Cards markup tag reference (X Developer Platform, archived February 2026).

Examples

  • Bad 
    <head>
  <title>Drain cleaning | Corner Plumbing</title>
  <meta name="description" content="Blocked drain? Same-day drain cleaning in Coimbatore.">
</head>

    No Open Graph or X tags at all: each app guesses the title, description and image, and SERPCompass reports both checks.

  • Bad 
    <meta property="og:title" content="Drain cleaning | Corner Plumbing">
<meta property="og:description" content="Same-day drain cleaning in Coimbatore.">

    A title and description but no og:image: the preview has no picture, and the page is flagged as having incomplete Open Graph tags.

  • Bad 
    <meta property="og:image" content="/images/share.svg">

    A path instead of a full https:// address, and an SVG file, which X does not support.

  • Good 
    <meta property="og:title" content="Drain cleaning in Coimbatore, same day">
<meta property="og:description" content="Blocked sink, toilet or main drain? We clear it the same day.">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.example.com/drain-cleaning/">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.example.com/images/drain-cleaning-1200x630.jpg">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630">
<meta property="og:image:alt" content="A plumber clearing a kitchen drain">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

    The four required properties, a description, the image's size and alt text, and the X card type. X takes the title, description and image from the Open Graph tags.

  • Good 
    <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://www.example.com/images/drain-cleaning-x.jpg">

    Added to the set above only when X should show a different image, for example one cropped to X's 2:1 large-image shape.

Common mistakes

  • Leaving out the image. Apps then guess one from the page or show none, and og:image is one of the two tags SERPCompass checks for.
  • Using the logo, or the same picture, on every page. X's documentation advises against a generic image such as a site logo, and Google says the same for Discover: use an image that shows what this page is about.
  • Letting two plugins write Open Graph tags, such as an SEO plugin and a social sharing plugin. Yoast warns that duplicate output can make Facebook, X and LinkedIn use the wrong texts and images; switch it off in one of them.
  • Adding twitter:title and twitter:image but no twitter:card. X takes the title, description and image from Open Graph tags, but not a large card: twitter:card is the one X tag a page always needs.
  • Choosing an image format the platform rejects: X does not support SVG, and Webflow does not support AVIF or WebP for Open Graph images. Use JPG or PNG.
  • Replacing an image file but keeping its URL. Meta caches images by URL and does not update them unless the URL changes, so upload the new image under a new name.
  • Blocking the crawlers that build previews, with robots.txt rules, a login or a site password: X shows no card for a page Twitterbot may not fetch, and LinkedIn says a missing image may mean the site is blocking it.

Questions and answers

What size should an Open Graph image be?

Meta recommends at least 1200 by 630 pixels, as close to a 1.91 to 1 ratio as possible, and at most 8 MB. LinkedIn asks for at least 1200 by 627 pixels and at most 5 MB. X's large-image card uses a 2 to 1 ratio and accepts JPG, PNG, WEBP and GIF files under 5 MB, but not SVG. A 1200 by 630 JPG or PNG under 5 MB fits all three; keep the subject away from the edges.

Do I need Twitter card tags if I already have Open Graph tags?

You need one: twitter:card. X reads og:title, og:description and og:image when its own title, description and image tags are missing. For the card type, X's documentation says only that a page with og:type, og:title and og:description but no twitter:card may get a summary card, the small one. Set twitter:card to summary_large_image for the large image.

How do I check what my link will look like when shared?

Paste the URL into Meta's Sharing Debugger, which shows the tags Facebook's crawler reads and any errors, and into LinkedIn's Post Inspector. X's Card Validator no longer shows a preview: paste the link into a new post on X instead, and the card appears in the composer without your publishing it. Each tool needs you to be signed in.

Why does a social app still show the old preview after I fixed the tags?

Apps cache what they fetched. Meta's Sharing Debugger fetches the page again, but Meta keeps a cached image until its URL changes. LinkedIn's Post Inspector refreshes the preview for new posts; existing posts keep the old one. X's documentation says it caches card content for 7 days after a link is posted, and Wix says changes can take up to a week to reach X.

Do Open Graph tags help my Google rankings?

Google documents no ranking role for them. It lists og:title among the sources it may use for a result's title link, and says an og:image can influence which image Google Discover shows for a page. Their main job is the preview people see when your link is shared in social apps and chats, which is where a missing image or a wrong title costs you clicks.

Sources

Every step above was checked against these documents on 28 October 2026. Vendors change their menus; if a step no longer matches, the vendor's page is the authority.

Start with a free scan of your site.

Two to five minutes, no account. You get your three most urgent findings, and the exact count of everything else.

Free, 2–5 minutes, no account needed.